CoreWeave 三日跌 20%，信用市场定价五年内违约概率超 60%

CoreWeave shares fell 20% in three trading sessions as credit markets priced in a more than 60% probability of default within five years. The stock rebounded 5.9% on Thursday, but strong AI demand remains weighed against rising financing costs and heavy reliance on debt.

I'd like to say a few things about this. First:

It's certainly true that investments aren't yet fully paying off, and there's a growing expectation of future gains. There's an increasing sense that investors are worried these investments won't translate into corresponding returns. Or, to put it another way, that AI will actually bring about the new industrial revolution they're hoping for. However, parts of the value chain are already generating substantial profits, such as Nvidia. In contrast, CoreWeave's revenue of $2.575 billion in the second quarter of 2026 was offset by a net loss of $626 million and net interest expenses of $640 million. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that it remains to be seen whether the current infrastructure investments will generate sufficient returns overall.

Second: The scale of investment is extraordinary, even relative to the size of the economy. Goldman Sachs estimates that US AI investment will reach roughly 2% of GDP in 2026 alone. For perspective, the Manhattan Project’s entire wartime cost amounted to roughly 1% of a single year’s US GDP at the time. We are witnessing one of the largest technology-driven investment booms in American history.

It goes without saying that expectations and concerns are many times higher than with regular investments. At the same time, the market often reacts irrationally, like a herd, and a sell-off often drags a whole crowd down with it. So, here are a few thoughts.

Unlike the dot-com bubble, which was a true bubble where real revenue and profit remained elusive until the very end, the situation with artificial intelligence is different (e.g. fiber optic expansion/buildout). We are already seeing revenue being generated, and, more importantly, we are already seeing clear areas of application. Anyone who ignores or denies this is out of touch with reality.

AlphaFold offers one of the clearest examples of AI’s scientific value. AlphaFold 2, introduced in 2020, transformed protein structure prediction, an achievement recognized by the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. AlphaFold 3, released in May 2024, extended these capabilities to predicting interactions between proteins and other biological molecules. These advances are already helping researchers and could accelerate parts of drug discovery. To me, they are a compelling reason to be optimistic about what AI could make possible across science in the years ahead.

In agentic AI, as we use it in our everyday work here in our ivory tower, we can already see without a doubt that it is revolutionizing and forever changing regular computer work. Whether it's software developers, secretaries, or call center employees: agentic AI is already a support in all these areas or is poised to replace and revolutionize these professions.

However, it is also true that adoption is still in its infancy. This means that although the benefits are becoming obvious, companies are still hesitant and sluggish in implementing this technology, often hampered by a lack of compute, i.e., inference capabilities. When you then consider how rapidly this technology has improved in such a short time, from GPT-4 to the first reasoning models and tool usage, it becomes clear that the real breakthrough is yet to come.

This makes it clear to anyone who's looking into it that the true benefits of AI will almost certainly become apparent in the future (adoption), and consequently, so will the revenue and profit. I'm convinced of this. The concerns are exaggerated; AI is *the* technology of the future, and (I'll never tire of saying it) we're on the cusp of a revolution in science, a golden age is just around the corner. Anyone who's looking into it can see it.