GPU and neocloud defaults and stress events
No GPU-backed loan has been publicly foreclosed. These are the public stress cases in GPU and compute credit, with what lenders got back.
GPU and AI companies
Updated October 17, 2026. Newest first in each group.
| Case | What happened | Outcome | Lender recovery and sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 12, 2026Character.AIChapter 11 | The chatbot maker, a buyer of cloud compute, filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware to sell substantially all its assets, citing legal and operational pressure; it estimated assets and liabilities each at $50-100M. | Sale process under way. A Disney affiliate is the stalking-horse bidder at $20M for a non-exclusive license to selected IP, subject to higher bids and court approval. The service keeps running during the sale. | Not publicSources: CBS News; Bloomberg Law |
| Sep 2025Northern DataInvestigation | Investigators acting for the European Public Prosecutor’s Office searched its offices in Germany and Sweden over alleged tax fraud: whether its GPUs were used for AI cloud or for crypto mining, which changes the tax treatment. Four people were arrested, per the reports. The company denied wrongdoing and said its GPUs are used for cloud computing. | No charges against the company stated in the reports we found. Rumble later agreed to acquire the company in an all-stock exchange offer. | Not publicSources: Data Center Dynamics; eWeek |
| Jul 2023Stability AINon-payment | Rented about $99M a year of compute from AWS, Google Cloud and CoreWeave; short-paid its July 2023 AWS bill by $1M and did not plan to pay the $7M August bill. | June 2024: new investors put in about $80M and suppliers forgave about $100M owed plus $300M of future obligations. Nobody repossessed anything. | About $100M forgivenSources: The Register; TechCrunch |
Bitcoin miners
| Case | What happened | Outcome | Lender recovery and sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 10, 2025Argo BlockchainRestructuring | Warned it might need insolvency proceedings; agreed a UK Part 26A restructuring plan with Growler Mining, which provided a senior secured term loan and contributed crypto assets. | The court sanctioned the plan on December 10, 2025. Bondholders, about $40M face value, took new common stock in full settlement; the London listing ended and the Nasdaq listing stayed. | Bonds exchanged for equitySources: SEC EDGAR; Argo Blockchain (RNS via Stockopedia) |
| Dec 4, 2024Mawson InfrastructureInvoluntary petition | Australian creditors claiming about AUD 13.7M (about $8.9M) filed an involuntary Chapter 11 petition in Delaware. | Dismissed with prejudice (written order November 4, 2025). Mawson then sued the petitioners for damages. | Not publicSources: Bloomberg Law; GlobeNewswire |
| Aug 24, 2024Rhodium EnterprisesChapter 11 | Failed to repay about $54M of loans due in July 2024, after a dispute with its host Whinstone (a Riot Platforms subsidiary), and filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas. | A $185M settlement with Whinstone, approved in April 2025, funded a liquidation plan proposing 100% of claims plus post-petition interest to creditors that did not agree to less; the court confirmed the plan in December 2025. | 100% of claims plus interest proposed under the plan; final distributions not yet publicSources: Cointelegraph; Chapter11Cases; Barnes & Thornburg; Bloomberg Law |
| Feb 2023Bitfarms / BlockFiDiscounted payoff | $21M left on a $32M equipment loan; the lender, BlockFi, was itself in Chapter 11 and wanted cash. | BlockFi took a $7.75M cash payoff. | 37%Sources: SEC EDGAR |
| Jan 2023Greenidge Generation / NYDIGRestructuring | About $76M of equipment debt restructured with NYDIG. | NYDIG took 2.8 EH/s of miners for $59M of debt relief and paid Greenidge to host them; it took a 44 MW South Carolina site for the rest in August 2023. | Repaid in kind; machines kept runningSources: SEC EDGAR; SEC EDGAR |
| Dec 21, 2022Core ScientificChapter 11 | Skipped equipment-financing payments on October 26, 2022, then filed for Chapter 11 with about $836M of debt, about $224M of it equipment loans and leases. | Equipment lenders chose new stock or a new loan for 80% of their claim; emerged January 23, 2024. NYDIG separately took back 27,403 miners to extinguish its $38.6M loan; Bloomberg put the machines’ value at about $25M, about 65% of the claim. | 80% (notes or stock); about 65% for NYDIGSources: SEC EDGAR; SEC EDGAR; The Block; Bloomberg |
| Dec 2022Argo Blockchain / NYDIGRestructuring | Owed NYDIG about $84M as machine prices and hashprice collapsed. | Sold its Helios site in Texas to Galaxy for $65M and took a $35M Galaxy loan on 23,619 miners; NYDIG was repaid in full, and Galaxy by August 2024. | 100%Sources: Argo Blockchain; SEC EDGAR |
| Nov 2022IREN (Iris Energy) SPVs / NYDIGPayment default | Two SPVs earned about $2M a month of gross profit against about $7M of monthly debt service; NYDIG declared about $107.8M due on three limited-recourse facilities. | One facility repaid; a receiver took the other two SPVs (February 2023). The courts held the parent had not guaranteed the loans; the parent paid $20M to settle every claim (August 2025). | Not disclosed, plus a $20M settlementSources: The Block; SEC EDGAR |
| Sep 22, 2022Compute NorthChapter 11 | The hosting provider for other miners filed for Chapter 11. | Generate Capital took two sites in the sale for $5M plus about $101M of its own loans. Marathon, a customer, wrote off $55.7M of about $81M in deposits, a note and preferred stock. | Lender kept the sites; customer left with a $40M unsecured claimSources: Hashrate Index; SEC EDGAR |
| Aug 2022Stronghold Digital Mining / NYDIG and BankProvRestructuring | Agreed to return miners to eliminate $67.4M of equipment financing. | About 26,200 miners returned (August-October 2022); Stronghold said it could replace them for under $40M. | Under 59%Sources: SEC EDGAR; SEC EDGAR |
| Jul 2022Celsius at Core ScientificNon-payment | Celsius, a hosting customer with about 37,000 rigs at Core Scientific, filed for Chapter 11; Core named the dispute as one cause of its own cash crisis. | Core sold Celsius its Cedarvale site for $45M, mostly by releasing claims (September 2023). | Settled by a site saleSources: SEC EDGAR; CoinDesk |
Data center and IT operators
| Case | What happened | Outcome | Lender recovery and sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 24, 2024AtosRestructuring | The French IT services group, which our Neocloud Directory lists for its GPU cloud, restructured under an accelerated safeguard plan approved by the Commercial Court of Nanterre. | €2.9B of financial debt converted into equity and €800M of interim financing repaid, a €2.1B cut in gross debt; €1.6B of new debt. Closed December 19, 2024. | Debt exchanged for equitySources: Atos |
| Jun 4, 2023Cyxtera TechnologiesChapter 11 | The colocation provider filed for Chapter 11 with up to $200M of DIP financing from its own term lenders and kept operating. | Brookfield bought substantially all assets for $775M, $1.3B including the real estate under seven U.S. sites (closed January 2024). Customers’ servers kept running. | Not publicSources: SEC EDGAR; McCarthy Tetrault |
| Apr 11, 2022Sungard Availability ServicesChapter 11 | Filed its second Chapter 11 in three years, citing energy costs and the shift to remote work. | 11:11 Systems bought the cloud and recovery businesses and 365 Data Centers most of the U.S. colocation business ($52.5M bid); the sales closed November 1, 2022 and four remaining sites were wound down. | Not publicSources: Data Center Dynamics; Business Wire |
Lease walkaways, delays and price drops (not defaults)
| Case | What happened | Outcome | Lender recovery and sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2025Fermi (Project Matador)Contract termination | In December 2025 the first prospective tenant of the Amarillo, Texas AI campus terminated a $150M advance-in-aid-of-construction agreement. The lease itself was a non-binding letter of intent. | Fermi said it had not spent any of the funds and the letter of intent remained in place. The shares fell about a third on December 12, 2025 and securities suits followed. | Not publicSources: SEC EDGAR; Barchart |
| Nov 10, 2025CoreWeaveDelivery delay | Cut its 2025 revenue guidance to $5.05-5.15B from $5.15-5.35B because one third-party data center developer fell behind schedule. | The customer accepted a new delivery schedule and kept the full contract value. | No loss to contract valueSources: Reuters via BusinessDay |
| Feb 2025Microsoft data center leases (analyst report)Reported lease walkaway | An analyst note from TD Cowen said Microsoft had walked away from leases totaling a couple hundred megawatts with at least two private data center operators, before the leases were committed. | Microsoft did not confirm cancellations. It said it may strategically pace or adjust its infrastructure in some areas and that its plan to spend over $80B on infrastructure that fiscal year remained on track. No missed payment was reported. | Not publicSources: Bloomberg; W.Media |
| Aug 2024H100 rental ratesPrice collapse | H100 rentals above $8 an hour in the 2023 shortage cleared at $1-2 on short-term auctions by August 2024. | No public default. Resale prices held up through 2025 while rental rates kept falling: revenue and recovery moved apart. | Not publicSources: Latent Space |
| Sep 15, 2022Ethereum MergePrice collapse | Ethereum stopped paying GPU miners. RTX 3080 resale fell from $1,783 (January 1, 2022) to $638 (August 1, 2022); HIVE took a $38.8M impairment on its mining equipment (ASICs and GPUs) in the quarter after the Merge. | Data center GPUs found a second use in cloud rental; consumer cards did not. | Not publicSources: Tom’s Hardware; Newsfile |
Precedents
| Case | What happened | Outcome | Lender recovery and sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1979Itel and the IBM 4300Price collapse | IBM’s cheaper 4300 series, announced in 1979, cut the value of installed mainframes and set off a wave of lease cancellations. Itel, with $1.7B of leases on IBM-compatible computers, lost $443.3M that year and owed $1.3B to more than 200 creditors. | Customers handed back obsolete computers. Lloyd’s underwriters that had insured computer lessors against technological obsolescence lost about $400M (1980). | Not publicSources: Christian Science Monitor; Lloyd’s |
Recovery is the share of the lender's claim a filing or report states; blank where none does.
The short answer
No neocloud has publicly defaulted on a GPU-backed loan, and we found no public record of a GPU-backed loan being foreclosed and its GPUs auctioned as of October 2026. The public defaults, bankruptcies and restructurings are next door: bitcoin miners financed on the same kind of equipment loans (Argo Blockchain, Rhodium Enterprises, Greenidge Generation, Core Scientific, IREN (Iris Energy) SPVs, Compute North and Stronghold Digital Mining), data center and IT operators (Cyxtera, Sungard, Atos), and AI companies that stopped paying for compute or filed (Stability AI, Character.AI).
The closest examples are the 2022-2024 bitcoin-mining equipment loans. Lenders that took the machines back, or a cash payoff, recovered 37% to 65%: NYDIG took back 27,403 Core Scientific miners against $38.6M, and BlockFi took $7.75M for $21M owed by Bitfarms. Lenders that stayed with a borrower that kept its site or contracts recovered 80% to 100%: Argo repaid NYDIG in full with a $65M site sale and a $35M Galaxy loan.
Credit support in front of offtake risk
Stronger parties stand in front of offtake risk in 8 public deals in our Offtake Tracker: a backstop, guarantee or letters of credit behind the buyer's payments. They protect the cash flow; the resale value of the GPUs stays with the lender.
| Date | Deal | Credit support | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 17, 2026 | OpenAI at SB Energy (NVIDIA-backed) | NVIDIA backstop of up to $105B for the initial phase if OpenAI leaves and the site cannot be re-leased | Axios |
| Apr 1, 2026 | ESDS Software Solutions at SharonAI | $140M letters of credit or bank guarantees | SEC; SEC |
| Dec 17, 2025 | Fluidstack (for Anthropic) at Hut 8 | Google backstops lease payments for the 15-year base term | DCD; SEC |
| Oct 27, 2025 | Fluidstack at TeraWulf (Abernathy JV) | $1.3B Google credit support | DCD; SEC |
| Sep 25, 2025 | Fluidstack at Cipher Digital | Google backstops $1.4B of Fluidstack lease obligations; warrants for about 5.4% of Cipher | The Block |
| Sep 9, 2025 | NVIDIA for CoreWeave | NVIDIA must buy residual unsold capacity through April 13, 2032 (initial value $6.3B) | SEC |
| Aug 18, 2025 | Fluidstack at TeraWulf | Incremental $1.4B Google backstop (total $3.2B) | The Fly |
| Aug 13, 2025 | Fluidstack at TeraWulf | Google backstops $1.8B of Fluidstack lease obligations; receives warrants (about 8% stake) | DCD |
What the cases show
The lenders that recovered best kept the collateral earning: a site sale, machines left running under a hosting deal, or a stake in a company that kept its power. The ones that took machines back to sell took them near the bottom of the market. For a GPU loan, the equivalent of keeping the site alive is a backup operator named at funding, with access rights in the colocation contract.
The trouble showed before the missed payment: payments later than terms, gross profit falling toward debt service, unpaid colocation bills at the host, and serial numbers that no longer matched the UCC-1 schedule. The full reading is in what lenders recover when compute loans default, and the steps to take in the GPU loan default playbook.
Methodology and sources
Show the method and sources
A case is listed when a named company’s default, bankruptcy, restructuring, non-payment, contract termination or investigation touches GPU or compute credit and is public in a filing, court record or press report, linked in the row. Bitcoin miners are included because their 2022 equipment loans were the closest public test of loans on serial-numbered computers. Events that were not defaults (a lease walkaway reported by an analyst, a delivery delay, a terminated tenant agreement, price collapses that moved collateral values) are listed in their own group, with the company's response where it gave one.
The cases come from our recovery casebook and its references, plus 7 cases checked against filings and press for this page in October 2026 (Character.AI, Fermi (Project Matador), Argo Blockchain, Mawson Infrastructure, Rhodium Enterprises, Sungard Availability Services and Atos). 16 rows here cover 19 of the 24 stress events counted on the risks, ranked; the other 5 are older precedents outside compute, in the casebook. The 7 newer cases are not yet in those counts. Recovery is shown only where a source states it. Tell us about a public case we missed at hello@amcompute.com.
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GPU default questions
- Which GPU companies have defaulted?
- No neocloud has publicly defaulted on a GPU-backed loan as of October 2026. The public defaults, bankruptcies and restructurings are among bitcoin miners on equipment loans, data center and IT operators, and AI companies that stopped paying for compute or filed.
- What are examples of GPU loan defaults?
- The 2022-2024 bitcoin-mining equipment loans: lenders that took the machines back, or a cash payoff, recovered 37% to 65% of the claim, and lenders that stayed with a borrower that kept its site or contracts recovered 80% to 100%.
- Has a neocloud gone bankrupt?
- No GPU-focused neocloud has filed for bankruptcy as of October 2026. Atos, an IT group our Neocloud Directory lists for its GPU cloud, restructured its debt under a French accelerated safeguard plan in 2024. The nearest GPU-era cases are Character.AI (Chapter 11, Oct 12, 2026), Northern Data (investigation, Sep 2025) and Stability AI (non-payment, Jul 2023). Other GPU-era events were not defaults: Fermi (Project Matador), CoreWeave, Microsoft data center leases (analyst report), H100 rental rates and Ethereum Merge.