Goldman Sachs is reported to be marketing roughly $1.15 billion of high-yield paper to fund a data centre near Richmond, Virginia, built by PowerHouse Data Centers and Chirisa Technology Parks with equity from Blue Owl funds, and leased to CoreWeave. That figure and those names reach us through press coverage and a trending news module, not through an offering document or a filing, and nothing below depends on them being right.
What does not depend on them is the structure they describe, because CoreWeave documents it itself. The June-quarter 10-Q, filed August 12, contains a larger and more checkable version of the same story — and the number that matters is not in the debt note.
$35.1 billion of debt, $64.6 billion of rent
The debt note is the part everyone reads: $35,068M of total debt at June 30, up from $21,373M at year-end, of which $31,405M is recourse and only $3,663M — 10.4% — is non-recourse. Effective interest rates on the recourse stack run 9% to 12%, with the two convertible lines at 2%.
The lease note is larger. Two disclosures, both on the face of it:
| From the June-quarter 10-Q | Amount |
|---|---|
| Total undiscounted operating lease payments, commenced leases | $29,135M |
| — of which imputed interest | $(12,816)M |
| — present value, on the balance sheet | $16,319M |
| Estimated future undiscounted payments, leases executed but not yet commenced | $35,500M |
| Committed rent, both categories | $64,635M |
| Total debt, for comparison | $35,068M |
Forty-four percent of the committed lease total is imputed interest, which tells you what discount rate these leases carry. The not-yet-commenced leases start between 2026 and 2029 with terms of seven to sixteen years. None of this is buried: it is in the leases note, in plain language, and the $35.5 billion figure is stated to the tenth of a billion.
What the $35.5 billion excludes
This is the part worth reading twice. The filing states that the $35.5 billion does not include the following, because they "include significant uncertainties regarding the amount of future lease payments":
- One site with 393 MW of electrical power still undelivered, where rent is set by the lessor's construction costs "subject to a contractual maximum of $14.7 billion over the sixteen year term of this lease."
- A further 355 MW undelivered across other sites, on the same construction-cost basis, with no figure given at all.
- Separately, $500 million to $1.2 billion of equipment CoreWeave has contracted to procure and install at leased premises through 2028.
So the disclosed commitment is $64.6 billion, the disclosed-plus-capped figure is $79.3 billion, and the honest number is "$79.3 billion plus 355 megawatts nobody has priced." Add the $16.3 billion present value of the commenced leases to the $35.1 billion of debt and CoreWeave carries $51.6 billion of obligations on a balance sheet with $5.0 billion of stockholders' equity.
The denominator, which is the backlog
We ranked the neoclouds on contract value per megawatt two days ago and put CoreWeave at $28.1M of backlog per contracted megawatt — $104 billion of revenue backlog across 3.7 GW of contracted power. Run the rent through the same denominator:
- Committed rent per contracted megawatt: $17.5M
- Including the capped site: $21.4M
- Revenue backlog per contracted megawatt: $28.1M
Which is to say 62% of the backlog is already spoken for as rent, rising to 76% if the capped site fills to its maximum. That is not a scandal — a landlord takes a large share of a data centre's economics and always has — but it is the number that makes the backlog legible. A $104 billion backlog against which $64.6 billion of rent is already contracted is a different object from a $104 billion backlog full stop, and only one of those two numbers gets quoted.
Who owes the money, in the company's own words
Here is where the junk bonds come in, and the filing is unusually direct about it:
"The Company has entered into various leases with data center developers and operators that are VIEs. The Company lacks the power to direct the activities that most significantly impact these data center developers' and operators' economic performance and is not the primary beneficiary; therefore, the Company has not consolidated these VIEs."
CoreWeave's stated maximum exposure to loss under those leases is $108 million — its prepayments. A separate group of special-purpose entities sponsored by a third-party financial investor, holding the electrical and mechanical infrastructure for one data centre, carries committed payments of about $1.8 billion, which the filing says are already inside the $35.5 billion.
That $108 million figure is going to be misused, so be precise about it: maximum exposure to loss answers a different question than the one this article is asking. It measures what CoreWeave could lose in those vehicles if they failed. It does not measure what CoreWeave has agreed to pay them in rent, which is in the lease note and is three orders of magnitude larger. Both numbers are correct, they are two feet apart in the same document, and the accounting question they answer is not the economic one.
This is also not concealment, and a piece that framed it that way would be wrong. Long-lived, contracted assets financed with non-recourse debt at the asset level is what project finance is for, and CoreWeave discloses the lease side in more detail than it has to. The observation is narrower and it survives all of that: the debt that funds CoreWeave's megawatts is increasingly not on CoreWeave's balance sheet, while the obligation to service it is — as rent, in a different note, on an undiscounted basis, split across two figures neither of which is a total.
There is one more wrinkle that shows how tangled these relationships are. CoreWeave is not only the tenant of one developer, it is the lender: it holds a senior secured delayed-draw note receivable against a data centre service provider at a stated 13% per annum, reassessed as a VIE and deconsolidated during the June quarter. Its funding commitment there "is not subject to a contractual cap," and amounts funded are "recoverable from the DCSP only through contingent, unsecured reimbursement rights."
The interest bill, with more than one denominator
The figure everyone quotes from the June quarter is that interest expense of $640M was 5.0x adjusted operating income of $128M. That is true and it is in our Q2 capture, but adjusted operating income is a small number by construction at this stage of a build, so a single denominator here proves less than it appears to:
| Denominator | Interest cover |
|---|---|
| Adjusted operating income, $128M | 5.0x interest |
| Adjusted EBITDA, $1,510M | 0.42x interest |
Against adjusted EBITDA the interest bill is comfortably covered. But adjusted EBITDA of $1,510M is 92% depreciation add-back — D&A was $1,393M — and depreciation on a GPU fleet is not a non-cash accounting artefact you can wave through, it is the cost of the thing that produces the revenue. Neither ratio is the answer on its own, which is the honest way to leave it.
Two facts sit either side of that. Operating cash flow turned positive for the first time in our stored series, at $679M. And free cash flow was −$5,743M, because capital expenditure of $6,422M was 9.5x operating cash flow. Note also that our free-cash-flow convention deliberately excludes finance-leased hardware — a piece about obligations that sit outside the headline figure cannot then quietly lean on a figure with an exclusion of its own.
The refinancing wall is real and near: $4,413M of principal falls due in the rest of 2026 and $6,184M in 2027, $10.6 billion inside eighteen months, at coupons that recent issues put at 9% to 10%.
The other way to fund a build
Nebius announced $4.5 billion of convertibles yesterday, on top of a stack built from converts, at-the-market equity and customer prepayments. Same sector, same year, same physics — and a completely different answer to who carries the financing risk. Nebius dilutes its shareholders and takes money from customers in advance. CoreWeave signs sixteen-year leases with developers who borrow at 9% to 10% against those leases, and reports the result as rent.
The market prices both on backlog growth. Only one of them has $64.6 billion of contracted rent against a $104 billion backlog, and it is not in the debt note.
What to watch
- Whether the reported Goldman deal prices, and who the obligor is. If CoreWeave is the issuer it is ordinary corporate leverage. If a developer SPV is the issuer and CoreWeave is the tenant, it belongs to the $35.5 billion — or to the 355 megawatts that are in no total at all.
- The not-yet-commenced figure next quarter. It was $35.5 billion at June 30. Watching this line quarter to quarter is the cleanest read available on how fast contracted rent is accumulating, and it moves before the balance sheet does.
- Whether the 393 MW site draws toward its $14.7 billion cap. Rent there is set by the lessor's construction costs, so the cap is the only number in the filing and the actual figure could land far below it.
- Adjusted operating income against interest. $128M against $640M this quarter, up from $21M against $536M in Q1. The absolute shortfall has barely moved — about $512M a quarter either way — even as the ratio improved fivefold.
- The 2027 maturity. $6,184M, against an operating cash flow run-rate that has been positive for exactly one quarter.
Sources and provenance. Every lease and debt figure — $29,135M of committed undiscounted operating lease payments, $12,816M of imputed interest, $16,319M of present value, $35.5B of leases executed but not yet commenced, the $14.7B contractual maximum on the 393 MW site, the 355 MW with no figure, the $500M–$1.2B equipment commitment, the $108M maximum exposure to loss, the $1.8B equipment-lessor commitment, the 13% DCSP note receivable, total debt of $35,068M split $31,405M recourse and $3,663M non-recourse, effective rates of 9–12%, and the $4,413M and $6,184M maturities — is quoted directly from CoreWeave's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, filed August 12, 2026 (SEC accession 0001769628-26-000366). The two block quotes are verbatim from that filing. Revenue backlog of ~$104B, contracted power of 3.7 GW, interest expense of $640M, adjusted operating income of $128M, adjusted EBITDA of $1,510M, D&A of $1,393M, operating cash flow of $679M, capital expenditure of $6,422M, free cash flow of −$5,743M and stockholders' equity of $5,024M are from our June-quarter capture, which reconciles to the same filing and the earnings release. Interest-cover ratios, the $64,635M and $79,335M totals, the $51,608M of obligations, the per-megawatt figures and the percentages of backlog are R40 arithmetic on those disclosed numbers. The Goldman Sachs offering — its ~$1.15B size, September timing, Richmond location, the PowerHouse, Chirisa and Blue Owl names, and CoreWeave's role as tenant — is press-reported and could not be confirmed against a primary source; it is the trigger for this piece and none of the arithmetic depends on it. Our free-cash-flow series excludes finance-leased hardware by convention, as our capture states.
