AI in action · Markets
Galaxy Digital Fell 30% in Two Weeks Because Its 800-Megawatt AI Campus Has One Tenant: CoreWeave. StoneX Says the Market Has It Wrong
Shares of Galaxy Digital lost about 30% in two weeks as CoreWeave, the sole tenant contracted for the first 800 megawatts of its Helios data-centre campus in West Texas, saw its bonds trade at yields above 15% and its credit default swaps reach distressed levels. StoneX analyst Mark Palmer reiterated a Buy rating and a $57 price target on October 19, 2026, arguing the stock now assigns no value to Galaxy's digital-asset business; the shares rose 2.5% to $16.57.
The repricing of AI data-centre debt has reached the landlords. Galaxy Digital, the crypto financial-services company that is converting its Helios site in West Texas from bitcoin mining to AI computing, has seen its shares fall about 30% in two weeks, according to The Block, for a reason that has nothing to do with its own balance sheet: the only tenant contracted for the first 800 megawatts of capacity at Helios is CoreWeave, whose bonds traded at yields above 15% last week and whose five-year credit default swaps reached distressed levels, with Reuters and Axios putting its debt at $35.6 billion at the end of June plus about $16 billion of lease liabilities.
The lease is the asset and the exposure at once. Galaxy delivered the first 133 megawatts of critical IT load to CoreWeave in July under a 15-year lease; CoreWeave has committed to 526 megawatts of critical IT load across three phases, and Helios has contracted the full 800 megawatts of gross power. In the second quarter Helios generated $20 million of adjusted gross profit and $11 million of adjusted EBITDA against a company-wide net loss of $85 million. No dollar value for the lease has been disclosed. Galaxy has also bought land for a second Texas campus at McGregor.
StoneX's Mark Palmer made the case for the other side in a note on Monday, October 19, reiterating a Buy rating and a $57 price target against a share price that rose 2.5% to $16.57 the same day. "The concerns about GLXY stem from the fact that the contracted cash flows for the first 800 MW at its Helios data center complex rest on a single counterparty whose cost of capital has jumped," he wrote, before arguing that the current price undervalues the data-centre business and "effectively assigns no value to its digital asset operations". His evidence for CoreWeave's ability to pay is its contracted backlog, which nearly quadrupled to $104 billion in the five quarters through June, firm GPU rental rates, and demand for compute that is rising even as the price of AI tokens falls.
The counter-argument is the one the bond market is making. A take-or-pay contract with an investment-grade-backed counterparty is only as good as that counterparty's refinancing, and CoreWeave's cost of capital has moved from single digits to 15% in a month; Axios reported negative free cash flow of $5.7 billion in its most recent quarter, and three customers, Microsoft and OpenAI among them, produced 72% of its second-quarter revenue. Galaxy's stock is pricing the probability that a 15-year lease is renegotiated, not the lease as signed.
The episode is a template for how the AI build-out's financing risk travels. CoreWeave rents chips from Nvidia, power and buildings from landlords such as Galaxy, and sells compute to a handful of model developers; when its debt reprices, every link in that chain reprices with it, and the landlords, whose only decision was the tenant, move most. StoneX's $57 target is a bet that the tenant pays. The 30% fall is the market's estimate of the chance it does not.
Sources: The Block — Galaxy's AI data center business is undervalued amid CoreWeave debt concerns, StoneX says (Oct 19, 2026); Axios — Why CoreWeave's woes matter to the market (Oct 16, 2026); Reuters via Business Day — Hedge funds slide as AI bets unwind worldwide (Oct 18, 2026)