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While AI data center operator CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) has tripled its revenue over the past year, that growth is being financed with an enormous amount of expensive debt.

Including its lease obligations, CoreWeave carries about $15 billion of debt — nearly four times its total revenue over the last 12 months. And this isn’t cheap financing. The company paid $311 million last quarter just to cover the interest on its debt. Up nearly 200% year over year, its interest expense is now more than a fifth of its total revenue and roughly six times its gross profit.

And like Oracle, CoreWeave has an untenable degree of customer concentration. Nearly all of its revenues come from just a handful of customers, including Microsoft and other hyperscalers.

If the AI bubble truly bursts, the implications for CoreWeave would be existential. But it wouldn’t take a full-blown collapse for the company to be in serious trouble. Its key customers are also its competitors, and unless AI demand continues to expand at such a rapid pace that the hyperscalers remain unable to meet it with their own cloud infrastructure, Microsoft and its peers are likely to prefer to bring more of the workloads in-house and eliminate the middleman, CoreWeave.

And while the company does have some protection in the form of a $6.3 billion Nvidia backstop agreement, that cushion won’t be enough to sustain it if demand for AI processing power cools meaningfully.

These are just two of the many stocks that could collapse if the AI bubble bursts — other neocloud providers such as Nebius would plunge as well. So too would many of the AI hardware providers like Super Micro Computer, as well as a host of start-ups directly or indirectly related to AI that are trading at incredible valuations despite having little or no revenue, such as small modular nuclear reactor specialist Oklo and quantum computing pure plays Rigetti Computing and D-Wave Quantum.

No one can yet say for certain whether the AI sector really is in a bubble, but even the most confident bulls can’t deny that the scale of spending in the space is unprecedented and that the fervor surrounding AI mirrors that of past bubbles.

If this is a bubble, just as with bubbles of the past, there will be companies that will not only survive its bursting, but thrive in the aftermath. CoreWeave and Oracle will not be among them.

Before you buy stock in CoreWeave, consider this:

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Johnny Rice has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Microsoft and Oracle. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Prediction: These Stocks Will Collapse If the AI Bubble Pops in 2026 was originally published by The Motley Fool