TechPulse USA

Blackstone Dismisses the AI Debt Scare It Helped Inflate By Daniel Rao | October 22, 2026 There is a certain audacity in being the arsonist who shows up with a fire hose and then complains the neighbourhood is overreacting to the smoke. On a stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this week, Jas Khaira — Blackstone's new head of AI, the man who packed up in New York and moved west to run the firm's San Francisco AI hub — looked out at an industry spooked by 15% bond yields and pulled IPOs and declared the whole panic essentially overblown. The debt financing the AI buildout, he argued, is not the shaky paper of 2008. It is backed by "the most creditworthy companies in the world." Calm down, everyone. The problem with this reassurance is not that it is wrong. The problem is who is delivering it: Blackstone, with about $1.3 trillion in assets under management, is quite possibly the single largest private creditor to the very data-centre boom everyone is pani...

Palo Alto Shed 18% as a Zero-Day Met AI's Debt Panic By Meta, TechPulse USA | October 17, 2026 File photo: Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto Networks' chief executive, speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2015. Photo: Steve Jennings / TechCrunch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) Cybersecurity stocks are supposed to be the safe corner of tech. Crime doesn't take recessions and CISOs don't cancel renewals on a whim. This week, that whole theory got mugged. Palo Alto Networks closed Friday at $342.00 — down 7.63% on the day, and a brutal 18.55% below its October 6 record high of $419.91. Two days of selling. An actively exploited zero-day in the company's own firewalls. A hedge-fund stampede out of AI names. And a bond market that has decided neocloud debt is the next thing to short. Welcome to the week the AI trade's credit card bill arrived. Thursday: When the Cyber Trade Broke "Thursday's sell-off, in which Palo Alto fell around 7%, SentinelOne lost...

CoreWeave's data-center buildout is funded by tens of billions in debt — and the cost of insuring that debt just hit an all-time high. Image: TechPulse USA By Daniel Rao | October 16, 2026 While Wall Street was repricing the entire AI boom this week, CoreWeave's CEO was quietly walking out the door with the cash. Regulatory filings show Michael Intrator and entities tied to him have sold nearly $1 billion of CoreWeave stock — more than 10 million shares — since the company's IPO in March 2025. The selling began about two months after the stock hit its record high in June 2025, and it has continued as the shares tumbled — on track to lose 24% this week alone , the worst week in more than 11 months. CoreWeave did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. Here's the timing problem nobody at the company will explain: the boss started selling right as the credit markets started saying no. $1 billion out the door — and the fine print that softens it The nuance ...

By TechPulse USA Staff | Markets | October 2026 Wall Street has a price for everything — including the odds that the AI boom ends in a default. On Thursday, that price hit a record. The cost of insuring Oracle's debt against default climbed to 288 basis points, the highest ever recorded. SoftBank's hit 424. And CoreWeave — the GPU-cloud darling that owes nearly $50 billion — blew clean past 1,000. Read that again: it now costs more than $10 a year to insure $100 of CoreWeave's bonds. Its 2032 paper changes hands at 77 cents on the dollar, for a yield above 16 percent. "CoreWeave is quickly becoming the AI trade's canary in the coal mine," Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB, told Reuters. The canary, she might have added, is coughing. The numbers, and why they all moved at once The figures come from Reuters reporters Tom Westbrook and Amanda Cooper, drawing on S&P Global Market Intelligence and LSEG data. Five-year credit default swap sprea...

By TechPulse USA Staff | Explainer | October 2026 As of October 2026: figures are dated to this month — when the semiconductor index lost $1.6 trillion in six sessions and Gartner warned 80% of neoclouds could be gone by 2030. CoreWeave co-founder Brannin McBee said something in October 2026 that should make anyone's eyebrows move. Speaking to the Financial Times , he said the company was chasing an investment-grade credit rating — a rating, he said, that would open the door to "unlimited" pools of capital. A company that rents out computer chips wants its appetite for debt treated as a feature, and for four years the market has more or less agreed. Welcome to the neocloud: the specialist GPU cloud. These companies sit between Nvidia's chip fabs and the AI labs, buying the world's most expensive processors and leasing them back to anyone training or running a large AI model. They are, in effect, renting artificial intelligence its brains, one GPU-hour a...

By Daniel Rao | October 14, 2026 Somebody finally did the division. On Wednesday morning, Gartner published a forecast that reads less like research and more like a foreclosure notice: more than $3.5 trillion of planned AI infrastructure spending could be exposed to impairment by the end of 2030, and over 80 percent of neocloud providers — the GPU-rental specialists that have been the purest bet on the AI boom — will cease independent operations by the end of the decade. Wall Street did not wait for the footnotes. CoreWeave cratered roughly 16 percent, DigitalOcean fell about 13 percent, Hut 8 dropped more than 10 percent, and the rest of the neocloud complex followed them down. The scariest part of the report is not the headline number. It is the arithmetic underneath it — the kind of simple, pitiless subtraction that ends boardroom arguments. File photo: a data centre server corridor. Gartner's new forecast says the industry's planned AI buildout cannot generate the re...

CoreWeave spent the last two years becoming the most famous renter of graphics chips on Wall Street. On Tuesday, it told the industry it wants to be something bigger: the company that owns the software every AI team touches from the first training run to the thousandth production query. The announcement came at Fully Connected, CoreWeave's AI cloud conference in San Francisco on September 30, 2026, which the company said drew more than 4,500 customers, partners, developers, and AI leaders. The product is called CoreWeave Forge — a "development layer" for building and improving AI models and agents — and it is the clearest signal yet that the neocloud wars are shifting from who has the most GPUs to who can make those GPUs easiest to turn into working AI. File photo: server racks inside a data center. CoreWeave built its name renting out GPU capacity; Forge is its bid to own the software running on top of it. (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Comm...