Worries about financing for the artificial intelligence data center investment boom sent shares of lender Blue Owl Capital and borrower CoreWeave reeling on Friday.

Business Insider reported Friday that Blue Owl had failed to find outside lenders to take up $4 billion it is investing with a data center developer for a Pennsylvania site. The expectation is that CoreWeave would be the tenant.

Blue Owl shares fell 4.8% on Friday, and CoreWeave’s stock declined 8.1%. Both companies have become stress tests for the AI trade on Wall Street.

“CoreWeave’s Lancaster facility is fully funded, under construction, and moving forward as planned,” said CoreWeave in a Saturday statement to Barron’s. “It’s standard practice for capital allocators to evaluate a range of financing options when managing large-scale infrastructure projects, particularly in high-growth, capital-intensive sectors like AI. There has been no change to the project’s timeline.”

Blue Owl did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CoreWeave is a “neocloud” company that only builds data centers filled with Nvidia equipment to rent out to AI customers in the cloud. The company has gone from $16 million in 2022 sales to $4.3 billion in the last 12 months.

CoreWeave’s triple-digit revenue growth is built on a flywheel. The company raises capital, mostly through debt, to build AI data centers. This feeds sales growth, prompting investors to lend it more money to restart the cycle. The company has a large backlog filled with contracts from companies such as Microsoft and Meta Platforms. It also has a close relationship with Nvidia, who is an investor, customer, and CoreWeave’s most important supplier.

Any hiccup in that flywheel—like a report about reluctant lenders—can send the stock plunging. CoreWeave’s share price has been volatile; since the stock listed in March, it’s moved by more than 3% in either direction for 61% of the days it’s been available to publicly trade. (CoreWeave investors will be able to learn more when the company reports its fourth-quarter earnings this week.)

The $4 billion investment in question would fund a data center joint venture between Blue Owl, data center developer Chirisa Technology Parks, and real estate investor Machine Investment Group. CoreWeave would be the sole tenant and be responsible for filling the building with equipment—which would likely cost many billions more.

According to CoreWeave, Blue Owl has never directly participated in any of the neocloud’s fundraising.

Blue Owl is a private alternative investments manager which has been a big player in financing the AI data center boom. Most notably, it partnered with Meta on another joint venture for a $27 billion complex in Louisiana.

Blue Owl stock was a darling of the AI trade in 2024, rising 56% that year. Shares have declined by 53% in the last 12 months.

Sentiment began souring on private credit in September, after two private companies, First Brands and Tricolor, entered bankruptcy proceedings. JPMorgan Chase took a charge against earnings on a Tricolor loan. JPMorgan CEO Jaime Dimon said in the bank’s October earnings call, “My antenna goes up when things like that happen. And I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.”

The comment landed like a bomb in the private debt landscape, with private lenders under the microscope ever since. Some investors don’t like what they’re seeing, and Blue Owl has become a bellwether of the private lending ecosystem.

In November, the company tried to merge one of its private funds with a publicly-traded one, because so many private investors were redeeming their shares. The private investors revolted and shut down the merger—but the problems that set up the merger didn’t go away. Along with the sour mood on data center loans, Blue Owl also owns lots of software and services debt –8% of its investments–and this sector has seen the worst investor sentiment in 2026, with expectations of industrywide disruption from AI.

While Blue Owl halted redemptions on the private fund, last week it sold $1.4 billion in loans across several private funds, with the proceeds being distributed to shareholders and used to pay down company debt. The largest group sold was software and services loans, accounting for 13%.