Jane Street paid $109 a share for CoreWeave now near $54, with $6 billion of rented compute on the line
The quant trading firm paid $109 a CoreWeave share in April and now marks it at about $54. Its $6 billion of rented AI compute depends on a landlord whose interest bill is growing faster than its revenue.
Vincent Jiang · 4 min read
CoreWeave reports on November 11, and Jane Street's $1 billion is already halved
CoreWeave+4.53% — CoreWeave, up 4.53 percent today, the AI cloud provider that rents out racks of NVIDIA+2.12% — NVIDIA, up 2.12 percent today GPUs, reports third-quarter results on November 11 110. The first test: whether net interest expense again grew faster than revenue at a company whose largest customers include Jane Street 110.
The trading firm has the most to reread. Jane Street paid $1 billion for CoreWeave Class A shares at $109 each on April 15 and, the same day, committed roughly $6 billion to rent its AI cloud 1. On October 23, with the stock near its 52-week low of $53.50, CoreWeave traded at $54.38 in Yahoo Finance quotes, so the stake is worth about $500 million on paper, half the purchase price 1.
The shares are down 54% over six months 15. Bernstein cut its target to $51 that day, and Morgan Stanley+2.58% — Morgan Stanley, up 2.58 percent today cut from $99 to $70 15.
The cloud commitment is the bigger exposure
The equity loss is small for Jane Street. The $6 billion cloud deal is the part its research operation will feel, because it is training large models on huge volumes of noisy data and needs the racks delivered 1.
No price per GPU is disclosed in the release, so the $6 billion commitment and the $1 billion stake cannot be converted into one another, and only the cloud deal has a counterparty that can miss a delivery 1. That counterparty borrows to build. CoreWeave pays for new sites with debt, so the customer's compute depends on the supplier's ability to keep borrowing 1. Jane Street hedges: one of its new Texas data centers carries 4,032 GPUs across 56 racks, retrofitted for liquid cooling 1.
Interest is eating the revenue
Debt has outgrown revenue every quarter since late 2024
- Total debt
- Revenue
Data
| Total debt | Revenue | |
|---|---|---|
| Q4 '24 | $10.62B | $0.75B |
| Q1 '25 | $11.9B | $0.98B |
| Q2 '25 | $14.56B | $1.21B |
| Q3 '25 | $18.81B | $1.37B |
| Q4 '25 | $29.82B | $1.57B |
| Q1 '26 | $35.15B | $2.08B |
| Q2 '26 | $51.61B | $2.58B |
CoreWeave's second quarter shows why the landlord matters. Revenue doubled to $2,575 million from $1,212 million a year earlier, but net interest expense rose from $267 million to $640 million, about 25% of revenue against 22% a year before 1. The quarter ended with a $49 million operating loss against a $19 million profit a year earlier, and the adjusted net loss widened from $130 million to $567 million 1.
Recourse debt stood near $31.4 billion at June 30 against $5,024 million of shareholders' equity, roughly seven times the owners' capital; total debt including non-recourse and leases is larger still 1. First-half capital spending of $14,117 million ran almost four times operating cash flow of $3,663 million 1. Management guided third-quarter interest expense to $860 million to $940 million 10.
Rivals signed, and the bond market priced the risk
Hudson River Trading, Jane Street's largest competitor, signed a multi-year CoreWeave deal on August 20 for clusters of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 and HGX B200 systems 16. Flow Traders signed on July 28 1. Jane Street is at once CoreWeave's shareholder, its customer and, with the Texas racks, a competitor in the compute race Bloomberg Law describes as a new front beyond pure speed 2.
The counterpoint is real. CoreWeave reports about $104 billion of contracted revenue, plus more than $25 billion of new commitments early in the third quarter, and its chief executive, Mike Intrator, told staff the backlog covers the debt 17. Even Barclays+2.74% — Barclays, up 2.74 percent today argues CoreWeave's debt trouble should not be extrapolated to the whole AI buildout 9.
But lenders have already marked the financing: the 2032 unsecured bonds traded below 80 cents on the dollar in mid-October, yielding about 14.8%, a level CNN's sources call distress 79. The $104 billion backlog says demand is contracted; the bond price says lenders doubt the financing behind it 79.
Wall Street's CoreWeave targets span $39 to $176
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| HSBC | $39 |
| Bernstein | $51 |
| Morgan Stanley | $70 |
| BofA | $140 |
| Cantor | $176 |
What the November 11 print decides
The third-quarter report is the first check against the $860 million to $940 million interest guidance, and the question is whether net interest again outran revenue 110. Street targets run from HSBC's $39 to Cantor Fitzgerald's $176, and the disagreement is not demand but the cost of funding the build 5. CoreWeave once drew more than 70% of sales from Microsoft+1.04% — Microsoft, up 1.04 percent today and has been diversifying toward financial customers precisely like these trading firms 8.
Jane Street carries its own distraction: India's regulator SEBI has an open case accusing the firm of manipulating the Bank Nifty index, and is reviewing short-selling rules against that backdrop 3. This follows earlier Inference reporting on Jane Street's $18 billion Fluidstack bet, where the broker books the contracts and the miners carry the debt 3.
If the November numbers show interest eating a bigger share of revenue, Jane Street's rented compute sits on collateral it does not control.
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