CoreWeave is the latest company having to pay up to attract investors into a data center-related debt sale.

The AI computing company just revised the terms of its $2.6 billion leveraged loan sale, offering yields of around 5.5 percentage points above benchmark SOFR interest rates, a person familiar with the matter said. The debt would yield more than 10% at current terms, which include offering the loans at a steeper-than-normal discount to par value.

The company's bankers originally marketed the deal with a yield as much as 1.25 percentage point less than that, the person said. The company will now have to pay significantly more than that in interest expense if it completes the offering at current terms.

"We're pleased with the outcome of this financing," a CoreWeave spokesperson said in a statement. "As with any first-of-its-kind financing structure, aspects of the transaction evolved during syndication as investors evaluated the opportunity."

CoreWeave has a junk credit rating due to a significant amount of debt already on its balance sheet. But even companies with pristine credit ratings like Meta Platforms have had to use creative joint-venture structures and pay much higher yields than normal to finance data-center projects in recent months.

Extreme demand for capital to finance the data-center build out is testing investors' capacity to lend and forcing the rates companies must offer higher, even if investors don't consider them a risky borrower.