Fresh off a $1.1 billion equity funding round, artificial intelligence infrastructure startup CoreWeave has raised $7.5 billion in debt so that it can more heavily invest in its cloud data centers.

Blackstone’s funds led the lending round, with participation from Coatue, Carlyle, BlackRock and others. In its equity financing two weeks ago, CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion.

Investors are flocking to CoreWeave, because the 550-person company is one of the main providers of Nvidia’s chips for running AI models. Demand for the technology is soaring as businesses across virtually all sectors are racing to integrate AI chatbots into their products following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

With Nvidia’s AI-focused graphics processing units (GPUs) in limited supply, CoreWeave’s access to the processors has made it a hot commodity. That means the company, which is backed by Nvidia, is going up against the world’s top cloud infrastructure operators, including Amazon and Google.

On its website, CoreWeave claims to have lower on-demand prices than any major cloud company. Even Microsoft, the world’s second-largest provider of cloud infrastructure, has started relying on CoreWeave to help supply OpenAI with the computing power it needs.

Collette Kress, Nvidia’s finance chief, said at a Citigroup event in September that CoreWeave has “quite some skills in terms of just their speed of adoption, their speed in terms of setting things up.”

A CoreWeave spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company is using Nvidia GPUs as collateral for the fresh debt financing. Such GPUs were used as collateral in a $2.3 billion debt round last year, Reuters reported.

The new debt will help CoreWeave pay for servers loaded with GPUs, as well as networking equipment and cabinets, the spokesperson said.

WATCH: CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator discusses the competitive landscape

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority cleared Microsoft’s AI partnership with Mistral of regulatory concerns after previously inviting views on whether the arrangement qualified as a merger.

The CMA said in a brief statement Friday that the deal “does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002.”

CNBC has reached out to Microsoft and Mistral.

Mistral, a French AI firm founded in 2023, won a 15 million euro ($16 million) investment from Microsoft earlier this year.

Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. tech giant receives a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company adds its large language models to the U.S. tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

In April, the CMA began seeking views from interested parties on partnerships agreed by U.S. tech giants with smaller AI firms to determine whether arrangements between the companies qualify as mergers.

As part of that effort, the CMA looked into the minority investment deals agreed by Microsoft and Mistral, as well as into whether Microsoft’s hiring of certain former employees from AI startup Inflection constitutes a merger. The watchdog separately invited comment on the arrangements between Amazon and Anthropic.

Now, the regulator says it’s no longer looking into Microsoft’s investment in Mistral. It has given no update on its inquiries into the Amazon-Inflection deal and into Microsoft’s hiring of employees from Inflection.

Microsoft previously denied its deals with OpenAI and Mistral and hiring of employees from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon has also said that its partnership with Anthropic represents a limited corporate investment, not a merger.

Xpeng AeroHT, an affilaite of Xpeng, aims to deliver its flying car to customers in 2026, the Chinese electric vehicle maker’s co-president told CNBC on Friday,

Last year, Xpeng AeroHT introduced the Land Aircraft Carrier — a large truck with a flying two-seater passenger electric drone inside. The flying car can detach from the truck, and people can then get into the drone and fly it.

Brian Gu, co-president of Xpeng, said the vehicle will be available for pre-order this year, adding that the company hopes to deliver the unit in 2026.

“The reason we are confident, because we are designing this for the use not in urban centers, but for outskirts in scenic areas where … we will work with municipalities to create flying parks and flying zones that allow people to enjoy flying without the hassle of getting all the complicated approvals,” Gu noted.

Xpeng said this year that the flying car is currently going through a certification process with the Chinese aviation regulator.

The 2026 timeline is slightly later than the fourth-quarter 2025 delivery target that Xpeng had previously touted.

Gu said passengers will not require a special license to fly the drone for initial use.

“Because we are using leisure and sports related use case for the initial use of that flying device. As you move more closer to urban … centers, you do need special licenses and that will be a lot more complicated to get approval for,” Gu said.

Xpeng has been looking to expand into other areas of electric mobility, with company CEO He Xiaopeng previously telling CNBC that robotics and flying cars were part of the company’s longer-term goals.