Six listed AI cloud and data center operators lost an average of 20.9% from their 30 October close to their 5 November close, on Nasdaq’s official closing prices, by our arithmetic. Over the same four sessions the S&P 500 fell 3.0%, from 7,580.07 to 7,353.73, and Oracle fell 11.9%.
The six are CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN, Applied Digital, Cipher Mining and TeraWulf, an equal-weighted basket we built for this piece. IREN fell the most, 24.7%, and TeraWulf the least, 14.1%.
Business Pill · Concentration
A short explainer on customer concentration. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss these companies.
The key insight: As we read the closes, six listed AI cloud operators lost 20.9% on average in four sessions while the S&P 500 lost 3.0%, and CoreWeave’s October 2031 notes traded at a 16.33% yield, by our arithmetic.
On Nasdaq’s official closes, CoreWeave went from $54.87 to $43.66, down 20.4%. Nebius went from $154.14 to $120.37, down 21.9%. IREN went from $23.95 to $18.03, down 24.7%.
Applied Digital went from $17.815 to $14.17, down 20.5%. Cipher Mining went from $7.29 to $5.55, down 23.9%. TeraWulf went from $11.73 to $10.08, down 14.1%. All six changes are our arithmetic on the official closes, and the 6 November closes had not been posted when we read the data.
Percentage fall from the 30 October 2026 official close to the 5 November 2026 official close on Nasdaq; S&P 500 from FRED. The six-name average is an equal-weighted mean of CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN, Applied Digital, Cipher Mining and TeraWulf. All changes are our arithmetic.
The Credit Side
The bond market moved too. On FINRA’s TRACE data, CoreWeave’s 9.75% notes due October 2031 last traded at a 16.33% yield on 6 November, about 11.7 percentage points above the 5-year Treasury par yield of 4.59%. CNBC reported that CoreWeave’s five-year credit default swaps “spiked above 1,289 basis points on Thursday” before easing to around 1,155.
That 16.33% compares with the 7.75% to 8.75% that Semafor reported for SpaceX’s $40 billion GPU lease, a gap of about 7.6 to 8.6 percentage points, by our arithmetic. CoreWeave’s figure is a market yield on traded notes, not a rate CoreWeave pays on new money, so the two figures measure different things.
Separately, a lender and two central banks are looking at data center lending. Bloomberg reported that about $500 million of data center loans, later reported to be ING’s, are up for auction, and that the Bank of England has queried market participants about projects financed without a tenant in place; Bloomberg also reported that the ECB is considering a review of bank lending tied to data centers.
Google, meanwhile, acquired Crusoe’s southeast Wyoming site. Crusoe said in its release that it has “more than 6 GW contracted and over 40 GW in our pipeline”, about 15% contracted, by our arithmetic.
As we read the scorecard, the spread inside the basket was narrow: five of the six names fell between 20.4% and 24.7%, and TeraWulf fell 14.1%, by our arithmetic.
As we read the credit figures, the 16.33% yield on CoreWeave notes sits about 7.6 to 8.6 points above the 7.75% to 8.75% that Semafor reported for the SpaceX GPU lease, by our arithmetic.
As we read the reports, Microsoft appears in three of them: CNBC on fewer neocloud partners, Bloomberg on Oracle capacity and the FT on Nscale, alongside the design change in the IREN 10-Q.
CNBC, 6 November, on CoreWeave credit default swaps
“spiked above 1,289 basis points on Thursday”
Three Implications
FOR THE SHARE PRICES The six-name average fell 20.9% against 3.0% for the S&P 500 over the same four sessions, by our arithmetic.
FOR THE CREDIT SIDE Bloomberg reported a $500 million data center loan sale, and the Bank of England and the ECB are reported to be looking at data center lending.
FOR THE CUSTOMER SIDE CNBC reported that Microsoft is looking to shrink the number of neoclouds it counts as partners.
The analysis says: “It is a sovereign-scale financing problem dressed in tech-company clothing — and the financial architecture is starting to invert.”
As we read it, this week’s figures sit on the financing side of that map: share prices, a bond yield and lending reviews. The analysis does not discuss these companies’ moves this week.
What Is Not Established
The basket is ours, equal-weighted and limited to six names; other selections would give other averages. The figures cover four sessions only and end with the 5 November close; they do not include the 6 November session. We make no claim about why each stock moved; the reports cited describe the buyers’ and lenders’ actions, not the share prices.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
Anthropic’s Reality Check, The Capital Squeeze, & The New World Order
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a growthstory. This week it started being priced as a credit story.
From the 30 October close to the 5 November close, six listed AI cloud operators fell 20.9% on average while the S&P 500 fell 3.0%, by our arithmetic, and CoreWeave’s 2031 notes traded at 16.33%, about 7.6 to 8.6 points above the rate reported for SpaceX’s GPU lease.
A note on sourcing. Share prices are Nasdaq official closes; the S&P 500 is from FRED. Bond yields are FINRA TRACE prints as reported in our linked piece. Reports on Microsoft, Oracle, Nscale, the loan sale and the central banks are attributed to the outlets named. The basket and all percentage changes are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
