AI infrastructure faces debt pressure and chip restrictions

Debt costs, export restrictions and fundraising are putting AI infrastructure financing under scrutiny. Coreweave pays 15% interest on $52 billion of GPU-backed debt. Its stock fell to about a third of its value in a single month after the disclosure, while its five-year credit default swaps remain at distressed levels despite a Nasdaq bounce.

Chinese companies are turning to Nvidia’s RTX PRO 5500, the most powerful export-compliant part still available, because the B300 is banned for export to China and the H200 requires case-by-case approval. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent together ordered over 3 million cards at about $11,400 each, totaling more than $35 billion. Total China orders topped 6 million cards.

OpenAI is raising about $30 billion at a valuation above $1.4 trillion, compared with $852 billion in March. The company told investors that annualized revenue has reached $50 billion and could hit $70 billion by year-end. Reuters reports that OpenAI wants commitments secured before Anthropic shares financial information with its own IPO investors.