Jensen Huang NVIDIA’s Founder, President and CEO at Computex Taipei. Credit: glen photo / Shutterstock Jensen Huang told Bloomberg in Stockholm that CoreWeave’s cost of capital is decreasing and that Nvidia does not need to backstop the company. On the same day CoreWeave’s five-year credit default swaps hit a record 1,194.5 basis points, pricing a more than 60% chance of default within five years. Jensen Huang said in Stockholm on Thursday that CoreWeave is getting financially stronger and that Nvidia has no need to backstop it.
On the same day, the credit market priced a better than 60% chance that CoreWeave defaults within five years. “CoreWeave’s strength is improving every day,” the Nvidia chief executive told Bloomberg. “I’m optimistic. Their cost of capital is actually decreasing.” CoreWeave’s five-year credit default swaps rose by as much as 74.5 basis points to 1,194.5, the highest intraday level on record, according to ICE Data Services. Nvidia is CoreWeave’s second-largest shareholder, with a stake of about 10%. It also sells the company the chips its business is built on.
In June those same contracts had fallen to 452 basis points from a December 2025 peak, and a bond backed by a CoreWeave lease priced at 7%. The spread has since roughly tripled. CoreWeave’s total debt stood at about $30B in June, roughly three times the level a year earlier, on a speculative-grade rating. Its backlog had reached $99.4B by July, against a 2026 capital spending budget of $31B to $35B.
Huang says no backstop is needed here. Nvidia is separately reported to be in talks to backstop $250bn of OpenAI’s data-centre financing. That guarantee would cover the lease and construction debt on a 10-gigawatt campus in Ohio. Neither company has confirmed it.
Nvidia’s own credit has been repriced as well. Its five-year swaps hit a record 82 basis points in July, when its own credit market flinched at $750B of announced deals. The concern is circularity. Nvidia takes stakes in, or guarantees debt for, customers who spend the money on Nvidia hardware, which critics say inflates demand.
Huang has called the idea “ridiculous“, while the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements have flagged it as a systemic risk. He is in Europe selling the opposite story. In Paris on Monday he said Europe needs to get in the race, and promised $2B of European investment within a week. Swedish media reported that he would appear in Stockholm with Sferical AI chief executive Jenny Nordlow and the financier Marcus Wallenberg, before opening an evening event for Nordic business leaders.
Nvidia and the Norrsken Foundation announced a Stockholm AI lab the same morning, opening in 2027. The pitch to Europe and the price of CoreWeave’s debt landed on the same day. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
Leave a Reply