AI infrastructure funding demand holds despite credit stress

By Rebecca Stone

Goldman Sachs and Apollo are shopping slices of SpaceX's roughly $40 billion Nvidia chip lease to investors, even as CoreWeave bonds now yield above 16%.

That split between active dealmaking and expensive credit defines AI infrastructure financing after weeks of weakness in chipmakers and neocloud providers. Investors are questioning whether the hundreds of billions going into AI infrastructure will pay off. The reference to hundreds of billions is an aggregate framing; the source disclosed no single spending total.

“There's still very strong demand for investments in the AI infrastructure build and the technology around the growth of AI,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told CNBC's Leslie Picker on Monday.

His assessment came as the sell-off began before the midterm elections and deepened after Democrats' sweeping Nov. 3 wins raised the prospect of data-center restrictions. Solomon said political shifts would create recalibrations and ups and downs, which the market is already showing, but maintained his deep belief in AI's long-term ability to drive economic productivity.

Where is capital still moving?

Goldman has been very active in AI capital-markets deals in recent weeks, and Solomon expects that activity to continue. Goldman's current work includes a potential Anthropic IPO and the marketing of SpaceX lease interests to investors.

Goldman is among the banks leading a potential IPO by Anthropic. Solomon declined to discuss it in detail, said it remains unclear whether the IPO will move forward, and called the market environment still pretty constructive. No valuation, share count, filing date or sale timetable was disclosed.

In the SpaceX deal, the source gave no slice size, price or allocation. Active marketing does not establish that the full roughly $40 billion lease has found buyers.

Neither move supplies a chip-shipping forecast, fab-capacity figure or revenue estimate for Nvidia or SpaceX. The disclosed numbers are transaction size, bond yield and the broadly framed hundreds of billions, not evidence of realized AI infrastructure output.

Can data-center policy redirect demand?

Solomon argued that data centers can be built responsibly and that blocking them would push the build-out abroad.

“We certainly don't want this infrastructure going to places outside the U.S., which is what will naturally happen because the demand for compute is there,” Solomon said.

His point was geographic: restrictions would not remove compute demand, but could send infrastructure investment outside the United States. For chip suppliers, policy could change where demand appears, not necessarily whether it exists. The source did not quantify how much of the build-out might move.

How tight is the credit market?

Credit markets have been less steady than the capital-markets environment Solomon described. CoreWeave bonds now yield above 16%, while some banks have shelved planned AI bond sales, according to MLQ's analysis of lenders pulling back from AI debt.

The above-16% yield is a market pricing signal for a named issuer's bonds. The source provided no maturities, ratings or issue sizes, so it does not establish a single benchmark for every AI credit.

Goldman remains on the selling side through the SpaceX lease transaction while also working on Anthropic's potential IPO. That mix shows capital-markets activity can continue even as lenders pull back from some planned offerings.

For investors, the distinction matters. A potential IPO is not a completed stock sale, and a marketed lease slice is not evidence that the full roughly $40 billion lease has found buyers. Pricing, rather than headline demand, will determine how quickly the build-out proceeds.

Solomon expects more AI capital-markets deals, but his optimism does not settle the cost of funding. With CoreWeave bonds above 16% and some planned sales shelved, the next test is whether credit issuance can recover from that pullback.