Smart Finance APP notes that CoreWeave (CRWV.US) is seeking to tap into the large investment pools of insurance companies to fund its AI
Infrastructure expansion is being funded. Co-founder Branning McBee plans to secure investment-grade ratings for additional chip-backed debt, and potentially for the company itself.
McBee, speaking about the funds available from insurance companies, said, "It's unlimited—it's like all the money sitting in insurance funds around the world."
CoreWeave has raised over $35 billion this year through chip-backed loans, high-yield bonds, convertible bonds, and equity offerings. As of the end of June, its total debt and lease obligations amounted to approximately $52 billion.
billion U.S. dollars.
An $8.5 billion loan secured by computing infrastructure and a contract with Meta Platforms (META.US) has received an investment-grade rating. CoreWeave
Seeking to expand this financing method to debt secured by contracts from lower-rated AI labs.
McBeath stated that CoreWeave's computing capacity for 2027 is nearly fully sold out, and the company has also signed contracts extending into 2028 and beyond.
The focus of AI infrastructure financing is shifting toward insurance capital pools.
CoreWeave's request is not an isolated case, but rather an industry model that is being rapidly replicated. On August 10 of this year, NVIDIA announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and
KKR signs a memorandum of understanding, planning to mobilize over $5 billion
A third-party capital of hundreds of millions of dollars to build a financing platform specifically for computing power assets.
The primary sources of capital are insurance companies' general accounts and long-term committed funds: Apollo owns the annuity insurer Athena, and KKR
Avalon controls Atlantic Global, Brookfield has a wealth solutions division, and Pingao and BlackRock manage large-scale insurance portfolios.
These platforms lend downstream to companies such as CoreWeave, Crusoe, and Nebius.
A new class of cloud providers and project companies building data centers. Borrowers use the funds to purchase NVIDIA hardware and repay debt using cash flows generated from power purchase agreements. CoreWeave recently completed an $85 million financing in March this year.
A $1 billion delayed-draw term loan was placed into a bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle (SPV), secured by GPUs and customer contracts, and received a Moody’s A3 rating with a pricing of SOFR plus 225 basis points.
One basis point, equivalent to a fixed interest rate of approximately 5.9%, led by Blackstone’s credit and insurance business.
Meta Platforms (META.US) applied the same logic on a larger scale at its Hyperion data center in Louisiana: a $27 billion SPV.
The debt has received an S&P A+ rating, with an issuance yield of 6.58% and a maturity date in 2049. Pingao is reported to have subscribed approximately $18 billion, while BlackRock subscribed over $3 billion. Meta holds only a 20% stake in the joint venture.
Equity; this debt does not appear on its balance sheet.
The asset securitization market is expanding in tandem. As of August this year, the issuance of data center ABS has reached $38.4 billion, up from $24.1 billion in the same period last year, and approximately double the $13.6 billion issued throughout 2023.
Three times the amount in billions of U.S. dollars. Blue Owl’s digital infrastructure credit platform has issued over $14 billion in data center loans since 2024; Apollo’s institutional credit division has done so in July
Month completed a $4.75 billion financing for a super-large-scale campus in Texas, priced at SOFR plus 340 basis points.
From chip collateral to investment-grade bonds
The key to bringing these debts into the view of insurance capital is a rating logic based on "credit substitution." Rating agencies do not rate the chips themselves, but rather the payment obligations of the purchasers: as long as the tenants are Microsoft, Meta,
These investment-grade, hyperscale manufacturers have take-or-pay contracts, making their cash flows equivalent to quasi-sovereign receivables.
The risk is that when the buyer is replaced by an AI lab, this substitution silently fails. OpenAI
Annual recurring revenue of approximately $25 billion, with cash burn expected to reach nearly $27 billion in 2026; its cloud commitments to Microsoft, Oracle (ORCL.US), and Amazon have been itemized and amount to nearly
$590 billion. Oracle itself illustrates this risk: approximately half of its $638 billion order backlog is attributed to OpenAI, and it reported a free cash flow of -$23.7 billion for fiscal year 2026; S&P has already
Downgraded its rating to BBB- in July, just one step away from junk status.
Another frequently discussed variable is depreciation. The economic lifespan of GPUs is generally considered to be only two to three years, while data center buildings are designed to last 20 to 30 years.
Year. Michael Burry has established a public short thesis, estimating that large manufacturers will understate depreciation by approximately $176 billion between 2026 and 2028.
This aligns precisely with critics' concerns: technology risk is entering insurers' balance sheets under the guise of investment-grade fixed income. Once AI infrastructure cash flows fall short of expectations, losses will ripple along the "AI
The chain of projects, private credit, insurance companies, annuity holders, and state guarantee funds may transmit losses in reverse, while Wall Street captures the spread during rallies and shifts part of the losses during downturns to state treasuries.