The artificial-intelligence infrastructure trade ended a turbulent week with sharp losses across smaller cloud operators, rising costs for default protection and a canceled public-listing review for Solidigm. The moves showed that investors were reassessing companies whose expansion depends heavily on borrowing and continued demand for AI computing.
CoreWeave became the clearest pressure point. A credit-default-swap spread measures the cost of protection against a borrower’s default; wider spreads indicate that investors are demanding more compensation for that risk. Nebius has no publicly traded CDS, but its shares and those of other data-center operators also moved sharply during the selloff.
Credit concerns reached larger technology companies as well. Meta’s shares fell 7% after its third-quarter results showed negative free cash flow and the company raised the lower end of its 2026 capital-spending outlook to $135 billion.
SK hynix added a separate signal from the semiconductor market on Oct. 23, saying Solidigm would stop reviewing pre-IPO and IPO options because of financial-market conditions and share-price trends. Solidigm, the U.S. -based NAND and solid-state-drive business SK hynix acquired from Intel in 2021, had considered an IPO as one way to fund additional U.S. Production capacity and support shareholder returns. The company said its growth and investment needs had not changed and that alternatives, including direct investment, remained under consideration. That leaves the capital-intensive expansion program in place while removing one proposed source of outside funding, reinforcing the market’s focus on whether AI infrastructure spending can produce returns quickly enough to justify its financing costs.