Data-center operator CoreWeave is a stock-market darling. Bears see its finances as emblematic of an AI infrastructure bubble

Those short-term figures pale beside a bigger and potentially more onerous obligation that isn’t on its balance sheet: the $34 billion in scheduled lease payments that will start kicking in between now and 2028. Many of those payments are stretched over relatively long terms, of 10 years or more. Still, some of this is for data centers and office buildings that have not yet begun to operate or bring in revenue—representing a vulnerability if any of the as-yet-unprofitable startups CoreWeave sells computing ...