Newcomer 分析利率上升如何冲击 CoreWeave 与 neocloud 算力扩建

The Week in Short

Rising interest rates are hitting neoclouds hard and threatening AI momentum. Valar Atomics feuds with its own investor, Masha Bucher and Day One. Latest Ramp data shows AI token spend leveling out. Bumble taken private by Ithaca Holdings, a buyout vehicle for top VCs. Ramp and Modal raise big new rounds. Bending Spoons brings in Berkshire Hathaway money, lays off Airtable team. Meta has a big week with Muse models. Ron Conway plays for Team Blue in the midterms. Bloomberg finds a sad story in Marc Andreessen’s hometown.

The Main Item

CoreWeave & the AI Infrastructure Build-Out Face a Moment of Truth

CoreWeave is an archetypal company of the AI boom, for better and for worse. Now the markets are testing its mettle.

Launched by a group of finance and bitcoin guys, CoreWeave saw early that there’d be a huge need for AI compute and built a highly leveraged vehicle that deployed massive amounts of capital to serve that need.

The risks were obvious from the get-go and CoreWeave’s IPO in the spring of 2025, though rocky out of the gate, had investors quickly send the shares soaring and set the whole neocloud category on fire. Companies including Nebius, Nscale, and Firmus ramped up debt-financed projects backed by Nvidia (both its chips and its equity in some cases) and private credit lenders such as Apollo and Blackstone.

Now the grim reaper of rising interest rates, alongside political backlash and general market jitters over the AI trade, is coming for the neoclouds. Anthropic financials that were released this week didn’t provide much comfort.

The betting here is that there’s carnage to come.

Firmus Grid, an Australian firm, may prove an early indicator. A former Bitcoin miner with close ties to Nvidia and also backed by Coatue, Jane Street, and Blackstone, it tried to go public last week at a valuation of $30 billion, though it only had $59 million in revenue in FY 2026 and has only delivered 46MW of its 912MW data center pipeline. Oh and its CEO had done time for insider trading. That’s circa-2000 bubble vibes for sure.

The Firmus IPO was pulled after investors balked at the valuation, and what looked like arrogant overreach, and they ultimately weren’t willing to back it even at a lower price. The company insists it still plans to go public in New York next year and in the meantime will raise private funds, though there’s been no announcement yet.

Nscale, which filed to go public last month, has a similar profile: a $35 billion valuation based on contracts with Microsoft and Anthropic, and a big ratio of promised megawatts to actual capacity online. That deal is already looking shaky.

CoreWeave, for its part, is battling a bond market that has abruptly become far more skeptical of the AI buildout; its debt was trading at distress levels mid-week before recovering somewhat, but the bonds still pay a 15% yield as of Thursday. Yet the company needs to be able to borrow at investment-grade rates — i.e. more like 6% — for its math to work.

Equity investors, still drawn to the upside of the AI trade, are hanging in there; CoreWeave shares have fallen 30% over recent weeks but still sit 60% above its IPO offering price 18 months ago. Yet the company is clearly in the hot seat: CEO Mike Intrator was forced to plead “irrational markets” in explaining the bond selloff, which was amusing given that the whole category is arguably the product of irrational exuberance.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — deeply invested, both literally and figuratively, in the success of CoreWeave and Firmus — offered a vote of confidence Thursday, insisting that CoreWeave’s cost of capital was actually declining and all would be fine. But a Bloomberg story late in the day showing that CoreWeave founders have sold $3.3 billion in stock since the IPO isn’t likely to improve the mood of shareholders.

Nor did the Anthropic revenues released this week provide a clean narrative for data center bulls.

In a meeting for potential public market investors, the company disclosed that it had hit nearly $17 billion in revenue for the third quarter. That’s up 46% from the previous quarter, which is impressive, but well below the explosive 100% growth it showed between the first and second quarters. Around 5% to 7% of Anthropic’s revenue came from “distillation,” a process where rival AI model makers train their models on the outputs of more advanced ones, per the Financial Times. That makes the $2 trillion valuation Anthropic was targeting at its IPO feel like a reach; on Thursday, Reuters reported that some investors were discussing a valuation of around $1.5 trillion.

The company is projecting it will spend upwards of $500 billion on data center capacity over the next decade. And cloud providers like Coreweave and the rest are taking on expensive debt in anticipation of Anthropic being able to make good on that projection.

It's a risky bet even you believe in AI’s transformative power.

Pro Rata Rights

Valar Atomics’ Battle with Day One Spotlights the Valley’s Unwritten Rules

A key principle of Silicon Valley today is being “founder friendly,” and there are a lot of tacit understandings about what that means. Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, is trying to enforce the unwritten rules with a lawsuit against his own seed investor, Day One Ventures.

When Sequoia invested in the nuclear-reactor maker earlier this year, other investors waived pro-rata rights and “spring back” rights that entitled them to invest more and would have diluted Taylor. But Masha Bucher, Day One’s founder, refused, and after several testy exchanges, Taylor says Bucher called on Quinn Emanuel to send legal threats. You can read Taylor’s version here and Bucher’s response here.

Publicly, most people backed Taylor, and some termed the situation “tough”; Silicon Valley founders are untouchable at the moment. But investors we spoke to were privately more sympathetic to Day One’s predicament.

The tussle also exposes the Valley’s seesawing founder-investor dynamic. Taylor raised money from Bucher — not a top-tier VC, with ties to suspect Russian investors — when he did not have better options, but after a billion dollars in funding, he felt empowered to rearrange his cap table.

Bucher’s side believes she alone was told to give up future pro-rata rights, while other investors were not, according to a source with knowledge. Taylor also gave other investors some allocation, despite their waiving, the person said. These details have not been previously reported. Valar did not respond to a request for comment.

“Masha wasn’t some elite VC, but god, what founder will now take money from her after this? How will it look? Can they trust her? And Day One’s name in a press release will now have a wildly different association,” one VC told us.

Investors like to say that if like to say if things work as they should, none of the details in complex deal agreements ultimately matter. If Valar becomes a “multi-trillion-dollar company,” as Taylor says it can be, Bucher will make spectacular amounts of money, although the pro-rata might have made the difference between, say, a 100x and a 150x.

While the episode in some ways underscores the importance of the fine print, sources told us it was unlikely to spur legal tweaks or challenges at other startups because if VCs over-negotiate, founders will go elsewhere.

Newcomer Podcast

Alex Kantrowitz on OpenAI, Nvidia & What Could Derail the AI Boom

Two Big Charts

Enterprise AI Token Spending Levels Out, Ramp Data Shows

The growth in new AI customers has dropped significantly, according to fresh business spending data from Ramp.

OpenAI managed to narrow Anthropic’s gain and xAI saw a slight uptick due to the popularity of GrokBot, but it wasn’t enough to reverse the trend that began this summer.

Meanwhile, AI token spending growth has been basically flat for two months in a row, likely due to price declines at the frontier and the models becoming more efficient overall, writes Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian.