Core Scientific lines up $600 million of secured facilities, freeing about $300 million of restricted cash

Core Scientific CORZ has closed $600 million of committed senior secured credit facilities, and unlike the initial coverage suggested, the terms were disclosed in full. The package splits into a $100 million revolving credit facility with a three-year maturity priced at SOFR plus 1.75% or ABR plus 0.75%, and a $500 million letter-of-credit facility carrying a 1.75% annual fee plus a 0.125% fronting fee. The facilities are secured by a first-priority lien on substantially all of the company's assets.

The lender group is the more telling detail. JPMorgan acts as administrative and collateral agent and joint lead arranger, with Goldman Sachs, TD Securities and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, the latter as lead left arranger, joining as joint bookrunners on equally split commitments. A syndicate of that composition lending against a data-centre asset base is a reasonable proxy for how bank credit committees now view AI hosting collateral.

The immediate benefit is liquidity rather than new spending power. Chief Financial Officer Jim Nygaard said the facilities are expected to release approximately $300 million of restricted cash, much of which had been tied up backing obligations that the letter-of-credit facility can now cover. That converts trapped cash into deployable capital without issuing equity.

Context matters for reading the raise. CoreWeave's proposed $9 billion all-stock acquisition of Core Scientific was voted down by shareholders and terminated in late 2025, so the company is funding its own buildout as an independent operator while remaining CoreWeave's high-performance compute hosting partner under separate long-dated lease contracts. CORZ traded at $18.06, up 3.7%, on SentiSense data, against an analyst mean target of $37.13 across 16 analysts, a gap that reflects how much of the thesis still rests on execution.

What to watch: how quickly the released cash is committed to specific megawatt capacity, whether the revolver gets drawn or stays a backstop, and the interest expense line in the next quarterly report now that a senior secured layer sits ahead of existing creditors.

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