Daniel Sparks, The Motley Fool Fri, October 16, 2026 at 12:06 AM EDT 5 min read NVDA -1.84% CRWV +5.94% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Lenders are getting nervous about CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV), a cloud company that rents out artificial intelligence (AI) chips made by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). In June, CoreWeave sold $1.25 billion in unsecured notes due 2032 at face value, with a 9.625% coupon. On Tuesday, Oct. 13, the yield on these notes reportedly reached almost 15% before ending at a record of around 14.5%.
A bond's yield climbs when the price drops. Put another way, bond buyers now want much more to lend to CoreWeave than they did four months ago.
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The stock followed on Wednesday. CoreWeave shares dropped about 15% as of this writing, and Nvidia, which is both CoreWeave's chip supplier and one of its shareholders, fell about 3% to roughly $221.
Should Nvidia investors worry? I don't think so -- at least not about CoreWeave itself. What Nvidia directly has riding on CoreWeave turns out to be small next to what the chipmaker earns.
CoreWeave's trouble doesn't seem to be demand. Showing how quickly the business is still growing, CoreWeave's second-quarter revenue more than doubled year over year to around $2.6 billion. But the company lost $49 million on an operating basis, and its net interest expense of $640 million was more than twice what it was in the year-ago quarter. Its total debt was around $35.6 billion at midyear.
Simply put, CoreWeave is still borrowing to buy its chips, and it doesn't yet make enough from operations to pay its interest costs.
The most direct link is Nvidia's stake. Nvidia owned about 47.2 million CoreWeave shares on June 30, according to its latest holdings report. That position was worth about $4.7 billion then.
At Wednesday's price of around $66, it's worth more like $3.1 billion. And the roughly 23 million shares Nvidia bought in January, for $87.20 each, are off about 24%.
Nvidia also has a capacity deal with CoreWeave. In September 2025, the two companies signed an order with an initial value of $6.3 billion. Under it, Nvidia must buy any CoreWeave cloud capacity that CoreWeave's own customers don't use, through April 2032, subject to some conditions.
Of course, this backstop might cost Nvidia the most if CoreWeave's customers leave, which arguably isn't happening while revenue is doubling.
Nvidia's latest quarterly filing doesn't name CoreWeave at all. But it does show $36 billion in commitments under deals with AI cloud partners, usually six years long, and up to $3.5 billion in guarantees on some of those partners' data center leases. It also lists a maximum possible loss of $4.7 billion from certain stakes in infrastructure financiers (companies that help fund AI infrastructure).
Together, those items come to about $44 billion spread across several years -- and the filing doesn't say how much involves CoreWeave. (The filing's far bigger guarantee, up to $105 billion on data center leases linked to an OpenAI affiliate, is another matter.)
For context, Nvidia made $63.7 billion in operating income in its second quarter of fiscal 2027 alone (the three months ended July 26, 2026).
CoreWeave's purchases might be a small part of Nvidia's sales, too. CoreWeave spent around $14.1 billion on property and equipment in the first half of 2026, and not all of it went to Nvidia. In roughly the same period, Nvidia's revenue was around $178 billion.
Even if every dollar of CoreWeave's spending had gone to Nvidia, it'd be under 8% of Nvidia's sales.
Meanwhile, Nvidia's profits are still climbing quickly. Its operating income grew 124% year over year in fiscal Q2, and it was up around 19% from $53.5 billion in fiscal Q1.
Yes, the bigger risk isn't CoreWeave alone. If lenders pull back from every debt-funded AI cloud company at once, orders for Nvidia's chips might slow.
Yet the stock arguably already assumes some slowdown. Nvidia's price-to-earnings ratio is only around 14, using analysts' average earnings estimate for fiscal 2028 (Nvidia's next fiscal year). I think that's a low price for a company whose operating income just more than doubled.
In the end, CoreWeave's bond prices are a fair warning of how much of the AI build-out runs on debt. But Nvidia's own exposure to CoreWeave is small next to what the chipmaker earns in one quarter. I'd still buy Nvidia stock at this price, albeit in a size appropriate to the high-risk nature of a growth stock like this.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Lenders Are Getting Nervous About CoreWeave. I'd Still Buy Nvidia Stock. was originally published by The Motley Fool
