CoreWeave's stock soars as earnings show major AI momentum

By Christine Ji

The AI cloud provider topped revenue and earnings expectations, with its CEO cheering 'an important inflection point'

CoreWeave's second-quarter revenue more than doubled from a year ago, surpassing Wall Street's expectations.

CoreWeave's second-quarter earnings showed that demand for artificial-intelligence infrastructure remains red-hot, as investors cheered an earnings beat that sent the stock up 16% in after-hours trading Tuesday.

CoreWeave (CRWV) reported revenue of $2.58 billion, more than doubling from a year before and surpassing Wall Street analysts' consensus estimates of $2.56 billion. The company also posted a smaller adjusted net loss than expected - reporting $567 million for the quarter, compared to the $677 million anticipated by analysts.

CoreWeave reached an "important inflection point" this quarter as the business has continued to scale up and gain "operating leverage," CEO Michael Intrator told MarketWatch. As CoreWeave's installed base grows, the temporary margin drag of bringing new data centers online creates a much smaller impact on the company's financial profile, he explained.

Increased demand from AI labs, hyperscalers and enterprises led CoreWeave's revenue backlog to reach $104 billion at the end of the second quarter, up 246% from a year prior. Additionally, over $25 billion of net new customer commitments have been added early in the third quarter, the company shared.

Notable recent customer adds include AI drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs - an Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG) subsidiary founded by Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis - as well as systematic trading firms Flow Traders and IMC Trading.

Financial services are a "major growth area," CoreWeave shared on its earnings call. "The customer contracts we signed came with contribution margins we expect to be 5 to 10 percentage points above those added in recent quarters," Intrator said on the call.

Also: CoreWeave, Nebius and other neocloud stocks pop as Google details its compute crunch

A key strategic advantage for CoreWeave has been its tight-knit relationship with Nvidia (NVDA), which was on full display this quarter as CoreWeave became the first cloud provider to test and run Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin NVL72 platform.

The second quarter marked a turning point in the company's adjusted operating income, which achieved a margin of 5%. The results signal a sequential increase from the 1% margin achieved in the first quarter, CFO Nitin Agrawal pointed out on the call.

Customers have increased their spend on CoreWeave as the company rolls out margin-accretive businesses such as storage, CPUs, networking and software, Agrawal noted. In particular, CoreWeave's managed inference business, which which allows companies to deploy and run AI applications, grew to a $100 million annualized revenue run rate, from $1 million, in the course of a quarter.

CoreWeave anticipates revenue of $3.45 billion to $3.6 billion in the third quarter, surpassing analysts' estimates for $3.4 billion. The company also raised its full-year revenue guidance to between $12.4 billion and $13.2 billion, up from $12 billion to $13 billion previously. Margins are expected to continue expanding and reach the "low teens" by the fourth quarter, Agrawal said.

Accompanying that revenue growth are greater capital expenditures to increase CoreWeave's capacity and convert its backlog into revenue, as the company's near-term capacity is "effectively sold out," Intrator said on the earnings call. Capital expenditures in the second quarter reached $9.4 billion, surpassing Wall Street estimates of $8.2 billion. CoreWeave guided for full-year capex in the range of $35 billion to $39 billion, up from $31 billion to $35 billion previously.

CoreWeave is on track to reach at least 8 gigawatts of power by 2030. It expanded its active power by nearly 500 megawatts this quarter, and grew total contracted power to approximately 3.7 gigawatts. To fund its continued buildout, the company has raised over $10 billion of unsecured debt and convertible bonds.

The elevated spending has resulted in CoreWeave's adjusted net losses increasing in recent quarters. This time a year ago, the company posted an adjusted net loss of $130 million, compared to $567 million for the second quarter of 2026.

-Christine Ji

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08-11-26 2017ET