Speaking with Ed Ludlow on “Bloomberg Tech,” Decoding Discontinuity Chief Investment Officer Raphaëlle d’Ornano offered several insights on the current pressures facing neoclouds, such as CoreWeave and Nscale, due to their debt loads:
Investors are scrutinizing how AI infrastructure gets financed, especially as debt costs and interest rates rise.
CoreWeave’s operating growth is strong, but d’Ornano highlighted its debt burden and projected interest expense, alongside its exposure to OpenAI.
Contracted backlog alone is no longer enough to reassure the market. Investors want to know how much capacity is energized and financed, and at what cost.
Neoclouds have different business models: CoreWeave is a merchant GPU cloud, while Nscale is building a more integrated model spanning power, data centers, chips, and inference software.