CoreWeave falls with rising rates, revealing the fragility of the neocloud model

The industry's most indebted computing power rental lost 7% in trading as the 10-year yield approached its annual high, despite revenue doubling.

On 18 August 2026, CoreWeave sold about 7% to fall back to around $98, well beyond the decline of its comparables — Nebius, Cloudflare or Snowflake losing less than 1%. The trigger is not operational but financial: the ten-year-old U.S. Treasury's return was 4.73%, at one hair of its highest one year.

The company's balance sheet structure explains this extreme sensitivity. Interest expense was $640 million over the quarter, the debt-to-equity ratio was 8.94 and net debt was 10.75 times EBITDA. A model of this type, whose cash flow remains profoundly negative, depends on permanent access to capital markets: any increase in interest rates simultaneously increases refinancing and the discount rate applied to future cash flows.

The activity is not slowing down: turnover doubled to $2.575 billion, the adjusted EBITDA margin is 59% and the order book is $104 billion. It is this tension — real growth financed on credit in a declining rate environment — that is now worrying investors about all AI infrastructure.