CoreWeave is seeking to leverage the trillions of dollars held by insurance companies to finance its purchases of Nvidia chips, according to the company's co-founder and Chief Development Officer, Brannin McBee — a move that would hand life insurers a growing share of responsibility for the debt funding the AI buildout.

'All the money in the world'

McBee defined the goal in no uncertain terms. "If we can get our chip-backed debt to become investment grade and eventually the whole company to become investment grade, then we'll be able to borrow from insurance companies where the money is unlimited, like all the money that is in the insurance tranche," he said in a report.

The prize is scale. Life insurers are among the largest pools of fixed-income capital in the world, and their general mandates concentrate on investment-grade bonds — broadly, ratings of Baa3/BBB- or higher — making the rating, more than the size of any single deal, the gate that decides whether that tranche of capital is reachable.

That is an ambitious target for a company that started out mining crypto. McBee and two co-founders, Michael Intrator and Brian Venturo, have built CoreWeave from a startup into an artificial intelligence cloud computing business — one of the "neoclouds" leasing out clusters of Nvidia GPUs to AI research labs and major technology firms. The company currently operates more than 1.5 gigawatts of active power and is aiming for 8GW by the end of 2030.

That growth has made CoreWeave a standout borrower, raising over $35 billion this year alone through chip-backed debt, junk bonds, convertible bonds, and equity issuance. Its debts and lease agreements total some $52 billion as of June 30.

The loans that opened the door

The innovation McBee emphasizes repeatedly is the $8.5 billion delayed draw term loan CoreWe structured in March, which carries a rating of A3 from Moody's and A (low) from DBRS. In its announcement on March 31, CoreWeave said this was the first investment-grade loan arranged on the back of high-performance computing hardware and a customer contract — in this case, an agreement with Meta.

McBee closed his first such loan in 2023: a $2.3 billion facility led by Blackstone, backed by Nvidia GPUs and an offtake agreement with Microsoft, priced at an effective rate of about 15% — not cheap, but innovative at the time. Since then, CoreWeave has completed five more deals, raising roughly $27 billion in total.

Not all of that debt carries the highest credit quality. A $3.1 billion facility that closed in May 2026 was supported by two borrowers with non-investment-grade ratings, earned a Ba2 rating from Moody's and a BB+ rating from Fitch, and priced at SOFR + 4.50%, according to a CoreWeave filing. An August loan worth $2.6 billion carried the same ratings and priced at SOFR + 5.50%. Those lower-quality loans are precisely what McBee believes insurers will not be willing to touch for now. "I do think it'll get there," he stated. How the next facilities print will show how quickly that door opens: a repeat of March's single-A marks would pull the debt toward the insurance-eligible universe, while further Ba2/BB+ outcomes would keep it in the high-yield territory McBee believes insurers will avoid for now.

Where the collateral sits — and who absorbs a downturn

The structures are designed to contain risk. The chips are held in a subsidiary, McBee explained, and all of the money earned first pays for interest, principal, and operating expenses, with about 20 cents left over for the parent company. CoreWeave has described the structure as similar to financing the construction of a power plant on a project basis — the same logic that underpins project finance across infrastructure, where an asset's ring-fenced cash flows anchor the credit rather than the parent's balance sheet.

The weak link in the chain, however, is duration. The August financing runs for approximately five years, while the typical customer contract lasts three — meaning banks are lending on the assumption that contracts will be renewed or the capacity re-leased. CoreWeave has said the ratings on the debt reflect "the strength of the collateral and structural protections."

Not so, according to Jordan Chalfin, a credit analyst at CreditSights, who is worried that borrowing rates could increase if others emulate CoreWeave's business plan. "If there's an overbuild, why would [customers] renew their contract with CoreWeave?" he asked.

CoreWeave's unsecured bonds have already been dumped, returning almost 15%. According to analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha, negative free cash flows are expected to amount to approximately $25 billion this year, $28 billion in 2027, and $18 billion in 2028.

McBee claims that CoreWeave would be "incredibly cash-flow positive" if it stopped constructing.