AI Slowdown Selloff: CoreWeave and Nebius Fell 9% the Morning Anthropic Was Reported Taking a Six-Year Lease
Dario Amodei called for an AI slowdown and CoreWeave and Nebius fell 9% by 9:30, the same morning Anthropic was reported locking in GPUs with Rumble for six years.
Dario Amodei asked the labs to slow down, and investors sold the companies that rent them GPUs. The leases Anthropic keeps signing, including one reported that same weekend, point the other way.
CoreWeave and Nebius opened Monday deep in the red after Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, spent the weekend calling on frontier AI companies to slow the pace of model capability development, and Sam Altman of OpenAI backed him. By 9:27 a.m. Eastern, CoreWeave ($CRWV) was down 9% at $81.25. Nebius ($NBIS) had fallen by the same amount, to $205.28. Both companies make their money renting GPUs to AI labs, so when the head of one lab asks for an AI slowdown, their shareholders hear it first.
But the same 24/7 Wall St. story carried a second piece of news, and it cuts against the first. A report named Anthropic as the customer behind a six-year compute contract with Rumble) worth $13.7 billion. Neither company has confirmed it. Rumble is the video platform that also hosts Truth Social, and it bought the German cloud provider Northern Data in an all-stock deal. So over one weekend, Anthropic's boss asked the industry to slow down while Anthropic was reported locking in GPUs for six more years.
What the AI slowdown call actually asks for
Amodei's request, as 24/7 Wall St. described it, is about how fast new models get more capable. Nothing in that description asks anyone to run fewer chips. A lab that trains its next giant model on a slower clock still has Claude to serve to paying customers every day, and I'd guess serving is what most rented GPUs spend their time on anyway.
You can see how committed Anthropic already is when you add up its paper. The company has $517 billion in compute commitments on the books, a figure 24/7 Wall St. repeated on Sept. 13 under the headline "and It's Still Not Enough". The reported Rumble deal would add a campus in Maysville, Georgia that's still under construction. It also reportedly gives Anthropic an option to buy 51 million Rumble shares at a penny each (a landlord handing its tenant near-free stock is a new one to me).
CoreWeave and Nebius got half of it back before 10:30
The panic didn't last the hour. By 10:19 a.m., CoreWeave was down 5% at $84.86. Nebius had recovered to $214.19, also down 5% on the day.
Oracle ($ORCL) fell with them, to $142.88, for reasons of its own. The company disclosed a $700 million increase in restructuring costs tied to layoffs. That swamped the better news that Larry Ellison had canceled a preset plan to sell $7.5 billion of Oracle stock without selling a share (Oracle gave no reason for canceling it).
Nothing I've read shows a lab canceling a GPU contract with CoreWeave, Nebius or Oracle on Monday. Investors just paid less for contracts that were already signed.
Who books the rent if the AI race slows
Rent is owed whatever pace the models improve at, so start with the leases that have been made public. Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for all of Colossus 1 through May 2029, which covers more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. That's a revenue line on $SPCX's income statement for the next several years (we covered how that rent roll works in Colossus 2 Makes SpaceX the Biggest Landlord in AI). Google's separate lease with SpaceX, at $920 million a month, runs from October 2026 through June 2029, and even that one has a condition. SpaceX has to deliver the GPUs by September 30, and if it misses, Google can walk or pay reduced fees for whatever arrived once a one-month grace period runs out.
Those contracts aren't all equally sticky. Reflection AI's Colossus 2 deal lets either side walk on 90 days' notice after the first three months, per the same Teslarati report, and the exit terms on Anthropic's Colossus 1 lease weren't in it. So if a slowdown ever turns into a real drop in demand, the short-notice leases are where it would show up first.
If the Rumble report holds, Rumble books $13.7 billion across six years. That works out to roughly $2.3 billion a year of contracted revenue for a company whose main product is a video site. Rumble shares rose 10% on the report, to $7.87.
I think Monday's selloff priced Amodei's essay as a demand warning when the paperwork says Anthropic is still buying. The landlords with long, named contracts are SpaceX on Colossus 1 and, if it's confirmed, Rumble in Georgia, and neither lease shortens because a model ships a few months later.
Amodei asked the labs to slow down over the weekend. Anthropic's reported Rumble lease runs six years.