Analysis
Three AI infrastructure financings have disclosed their borrowing costs, and laid end to end they show lenders charging more every time, not less, to fund the buildout. (Project Big Sky's 8.5% terms date to June, four months before this month's two other data points.)
Blackstone funds are set to anchor roughly half of the $18 billion junior tranche in Anthropic's $60 billion Project North Star chip-financing package, at yields above 10% -- a jump from the 8.5% junior yield on the prior comparable deal, Project Big Sky. CoreWeave's own bond market pricing has moved further still: its debt is trading to yield roughly 15%, more than the junior tranche on Anthropic's brand-new package and nearly double what Big Sky's lenders demanded.
Why the spread matters more than any single number
A rising sequence like 8.5% to 10%-plus to 15% across three separate AI infrastructure financings is a lender repricing exercise, not noise in one bond's trading. Project Big Sky priced when AI infrastructure debt was still a novel, lightly tested asset class; Project North Star is pricing after lenders have watched Firmus Grid pull a $30 billion IPO and CoreWeave's own bonds sell off. Each subsequent deal is effectively asking lenders to underwrite the same basic bet -- that AI compute demand justifies years of chip-lease payments -- with less benefit of the doubt than the last one got.
What the yields alone don't tell you: higher junior-tranche pricing doesn't mean the senior, investment-grade portions of these deals are repricing at anywhere near the same pace, and Blackstone anchoring $9 billion of North Star's junior debt is itself a vote of confidence that at least one large, sophisticated lender believes the credit is sound at these terms. The risk sits one step removed, with LPs holding both AI-equity exposure and "diversified" private-credit or infrastructure-debt funds that are now underwriting the identical compute-demand bet, just dressed up as a different asset class, as Pulse noted earlier this week.
What to watch: whether the next AI infrastructure financing after North Star prices above or below 10% on its junior tranche, a figure Value Add Pulse's funding tracker will keep updating as new deals price. A fourth data point above that level would confirm lenders are treating the whole category as riskier with every deal rather than settling into a stable spread.