See investment grade.
Investment grade The rating agencies’ mark of debt safe enough for cautious buyers, written IG. Debt below the line is high yield, or junk. Chapter 10.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the record uses it
- Scorecard indicator Oracle 5-year credit default swap (CDS, credit protection)
Also discussed in
Sources that use it
- Davide Barbuscia and Michael Gambale, “BlackRock Dodges AI Bond-Trading Flop After Offering Junk Yields,” Bloomberg, 27 July 2026, updated to reflect the bond having priced (in the paper’s own voice: “BlackRock Inc.’s $12.55 billion bond sale tied to a Meta Platforms Inc. data center”; “The investment-grade debt for the El Paso, Texas project was sold in an offering led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley at a 7.534% yield, a level more common in junk bonds”; demand from “Sopaipilla Investor, a holding company tied to BlackRock that holds an 80% stake in the data center project,” reached “just $20 billion on Friday, or 1.6 times the amount of bonds for sale,” while “The average demand for bond sales this year was closer to four times the size of the offering, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News”; “a premium of about 0.4 percentage point to where a Beignet note due in 2049 trades”; the pricing spread of 2.875 percentage points on people with knowledge of the matter) In the Sources
- Katherine Schwartz and Josie Reich, “CoreWeave Woes Risk Shutting Down AI Junk Market: Credit Weekly,” Bloomberg, 17 October 2026 (“Volta ended up paying more than the 11% yield banks had initially discussed, rivaling the highest rates paid so far to finance the AI buildout”; JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs ran the $5 billion loan) In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Junk.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/junk (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-junk-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Junk}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/junk},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}