Case Study: Wolfspeed identifies early credit risk signals with AIR Platforms

Wolfspeed flags speculative-grade risk 3 years before its last bond sale with AIR Platforms

AIR Platforms, a provider of AI-powered credit analysis solutions, helped Wolfspeed's investors by identifying its significant credit risk long before traditional market signals. The challenge was that Wolfspeed, a company with a long history of losses, was still able to access capital markets as it slid towards bankruptcy, and its declining stock price did not provide an adequate early warning to bond buyers about its deteriorating financial health.

The solution was AIR Platforms' machine learning credit model, which generates daily-updated Risk Scores. AIR's model assigned Wolfspeed a speculative-grade score as early as 2016, with a clear deterioration beginning in 2019—three years before its final bond sale. This provided an early and accurate warning of the company-specific drivers of its decline, such as poor profitability and high leverage, isolating them from broader sector performance. The measurable impact was that AIR Platforms' clients had access to a superior, forward-looking risk metric that flagged Wolfspeed's high default risk years in advance.

Wolfspeed