Source: NYT > Business (paywall)
CoreWeave's debt distress and Oracle and SoftBank's exposure reveal that the $200+ billion AI infrastructure build-out was financed on shaky assumptions about utilization rates and revenue models. The weakness isn't in the chips or real estate—it's in the capital structure: lenders underpriced risk on companies burning cash to scale compute capacity before anyone proved LLM ROI justifies the spend. If major data center operators can't service their debt, the entire vertical integration strategy—cloud providers building their own chips and facilities to capture AI workloads—faces pressure that could slow deployment and force consolidation around the few players with fortress balance sheets.