CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) and Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ:NBIS) became exceptionally direct tests of the AI spending debate on September 14. Michael Burry has pushed back on warnings from frontier AI leaders, arguing that the industry’s over AI risks is overblown and that slowing development would benefit incumbents by restraining competition. AI-linked stocks sold off anyway.
For diversified technology companies, a slower frontier may be absorbed elsewhere. For CoreWeave and Nebius, utilization of expensive AI infrastructure sits much closer to the center of the equity story.
Michael Burry
The contracts make Burry’s argument harder to dismiss
CoreWeave ended Q2 with about $104 billion of revenue backlog after quarterly revenue more than doubled to $2.58 billion. That gives CoreWeave, Inc. meaningful visibility if the proposed slowdown is about safety procedures rather than customers suddenly abandoning compute. The catch is financial leverage. CoreWeave recorded $9.4 billion on capital expenditures in Q2, posted a $626 million net loss and carried $35.6 billion of future principal payments on debt.
Nebius has a different balance. Nebius Group N.V. reported Q2 revenue of $582.3 million, up 454%, and adjusted EBITDA of $236.2 million. It has also said customer commitments exceed $40 billion. Yet Q2 capex reached roughly $5.7 billion, and Nebius closed about $5.75 billion of convertible notes in August. Rapid demand still has to outrun rapid capital consumption.
Hedge funds leaned in before the new safety fight
Insider Monkey’s database showed 71 hedge funds holding CoreWeave in Q2 2026, up from 63 in Q1. Magnetar Capital remained the largest tracked common-share holder with 52,062,927 shares after cutting its position 25%. Nebius ownership rose more sharply, to 86 funds from 60. Orbis Investment Management held 6,494,719 shares after reducing its position 22%. Those filings predate the September slowdown debate.
As of August 31, roughly 45 million Nebius shares were sold short, around 17.89% of float, with 2.31 days to cover. Nebius had just issued convertible notes, so the gross short figure can include structural hedging and should not be read as a pure bearish vote.
Burry does not need every safety warning to be wrong for his point to matter. If frontier labs simply redirect spending toward inference and deployment, contracted neocloud capacity can remain valuable. If the warnings mark a genuine reduction in compute growth, however, CoreWeave and Nebius have far less room to hide than Big Tech. That makes both stocks useful stress tests, with strong demand evidence offset by capital structures that punish a utilization miss.
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