CoreWeave shares tumbled as much as 10% in extended trading on Thursday after the AI infrastructure provider issued light revenue guidance and increased its 2026 capital spending forecast.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: Loss of $1.12 adjusted vs. loss of 90 cents expected
- Revenue: $2.08 billion vs. $1.97 billion expected
Revenue more than doubled in the quarter, from $981.8 million a year earlier, according to a statement. Net loss widened to $740 million from $315 million, or $1.49 per share, in the same quarter a year ago.
CoreWeave is targeting $2.45 billion to $2.6 billion in second-quarter revenue. The middle of the range, $2.53 billion, was trailed the $2.69 billion LSEG consensus. For 2026, CoreWeave maintained its revenue guidance. calling for $12 billion to $13 billion in sales.
The company ended the quarter with about 3.5 gigawatts of total contracted power, along with a $99.4 billion revenue backlog.
“We have reached hyperscale,” CoreWeave’s co-founder and CEO, Mike Intrator, said on a conference call with analysts. The company has diversified its business, with 10 clients now committed to spending at least $1 billion on its products, he said. In 2024, 62% of revenue came from Microsoft.
While revenue is surging, operating expenses are growing even faster. Technology and infrastructure costs jumped 127% in the quarter to $1.27 billion, while sales and market costs increased more than sixfold to $69 million.
CoreWeave has been racing top cloud providers such as Amazon to open data centers packed with Nvidia graphics processing units to rent to companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, that are training and running artificial intelligence models. CoreWeave is competing with large and highly profitable cloud companies, and is borrowing heavily in the process to finance its data center development.
In the first quarter, CoreWeave said it raised $8.5 billion in new debt, after announcing deals with AI startups Cline and Perplexity. It’s secured more than $20 billion in debt and equity this year, the company said, closing the quarter with almost $25 billion in debt.
Meanwhile, major backer Nvidia said early this year it bought $2 billion in additional stock in CoreWeave, which committed to adopting a variety of the chipmaker’s products.
As of Thursday’s close, CoreWeave shares had climbed almost 80% so far in 2026, while the S&P 500 had gained 7%.
S&P has upgraded its CoreWeave credit rating to positive from stable, said Nitin Agrawal, CoreWeave’s finance chief.
The company projected $31 billion to $35 billion in 2026 capital expenditures, up from a range of $30 billion to $35 billion that it announced in February. The revision of the low end of the range has to do with component prices, Agrawal said.
“It’s an issue, it’s a problem, but we have an incredible capacity to navigate the supply chain,” Intrator said. “We have great partners, and we include the pricing that is required in order to end up delivering the infrastructure that’s required, but also ensuring that we’re able to secure the economics that we’re targeting.”
CoreWeave reiterated that annualized revenue should exceed $30 billion by the end of 2027.
“I always think that everyone is looking at the stock and focusing on the trees and missing the forest, right?” Intrator told CNBC in an interview. “The forest is, there’s this seismic level change occurring in our economy and being driven by these incredible technology companies that are dependent upon the infrastructure.”
CoreWeave reiterated that it’s plans to have 1.7 gigawatts of power online by year end.
“That’s the forest,” he said.
WATCH: Investors are bullish on neoclouds but skeptics question their financing
