CoreWeave raises $3 billion more as its debt load passes $35 billion
The AI buildout's financing bill keeps growing, and the companies carrying it are getting more creative about how they pay. Two financing stories below, plus a robotaxi cap that quietly walks out the door this month.
CoreWeave is returning to the debt markets for another $3 billion, on top of a balance sheet that already carries more than $35 billion in borrowings. The AI cloud company announced it intends to offer $3 billion of convertible senior notes due 2033 in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers, with an option for an additional $500 million that would take the raise to $3.5 billion. It is marketing a separate at-the-market program for up to 35 million shares, and says part of the convertible proceeds will fund capped-call transactions to blunt dilution.
The terms will matter more than the headline number. CoreWeave's existing senior notes carry coupons between 8.5% and 9.75%, while its two earlier convertible issues sit at 1.75% — the difference between paying like a data-center landlord and paying like a growth software company. In its most recent quarterly filing it disclosed $27.56 billion of long-term debt and $7.51 billion of short-term debt, so the new notes land on a book that was already past $35 billion before they were priced. The stock fell on the announcement, at one point trading below $80. Backlog is not the problem — we covered this in August when CoreWeave's backlog tops $104 billion as AI cloud revenue doubles. The problem is that the backlog is only as good as the compute underneath it, and that compute is paid for with borrowed money.
Nevada's 100-vehicle cap on Zoox's robotaxi fleet expires this month, and the Amazon-owned company is free to grow in Las Vegas without asking again. An updated permit shows the cap lapsing in late September, clearing the way for Zoox to expand a fleet of purpose-built vehicles that have no steering wheel and no pedals. Its federal exemption already allows up to 2,500 vehicles a year for two years, but the state number was the binding constraint.
The timing is the story: Waymo opened commercial service in Las Vegas this month, Tesla and Uber hold their own driverless permits, and Zoox still only charges for rides in Vegas — roughly 30 vehicles are operating there by third-party counts, out of about 100 across four US cities. Zoox declined to say how many it will add, or how quickly. We watched Nevada take the opposite approach with Tesla in August — Nevada caps Tesla's Las Vegas robotaxi fleet at 10 vehicles — which makes this the first real test of whether Zoox's slower, exemption-first path converts into market share now that the paperwork is done.
Plaud AI, the maker of the clip-on AI note recorder, wants to list in the US by 2028 — but only after it crosses $1 billion in annual revenue. Co-founder and chief executive Nathan Xu told Bloomberg the Shenzhen-made, Realtek-chipped device business is targeting $500 million in global sales this year and has hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with 2.5 million users across more than 170 countries. The company says it is already profitable and was valued above $1 billion last year, with Temasek-owned Vertex its largest investor.
The interesting detail is the geography. Plaud runs roughly 300 staff in China and close to 100 in San Francisco, sells into US and European markets that supply about two-thirds of revenue, and just opened a Singapore regional headquarters that grew from 10 people to 100 in nine months. That is the shape of the current AI hardware wave: Chinese manufacturing and engineering, Western consumer demand, and a listing venue chosen for the market it sells to. The $1 billion revenue condition is also a useful benchmark — it tells you what a profitable AI companion device company looks like at scale, and how few have gotten there.
What to watch: whether CoreWeave prices the convertibles inside or above that 8.5%–9.75% band, and whether Zoox's Vegas fleet actually grows before Waymo's second city in the state does.
If the AI buildout is financed with debt rather than profit, does that make the boom more fragile — or just better collateralized? Tell us in the comments.
