CoreWeave steps into the earnings spotlight after Thursday's closing bell, with first-quarter results due May 7 at 5 p.m. ET. The company's stock traded at $127.89 premarket, up about 2%, as Wall Street braces for a key test of whether its massive AI cloud contract backlog can translate into real revenue.
The focus has shifted from customer demand to execution. CoreWeave ended 2025 with a $66.8 billion revenue backlog, representing signed contracts that will hit the books once delivery and service obligations are met. The company faces the challenge of converting that backlog into functioning data-center capacity at speed, with construction setbacks, GPU shortages, and funding gaps all potential hurdles.
Guidance calls for first-quarter revenue between $1.9 billion and $2.0 billion, with adjusted operating income ranging from flat to $40 million. Capital expenditures are pegged at $6 billion to $7 billion, while interest expense should land between $510 million and $590 million. For 2026, CoreWeave projects revenue in the $12 billion to $13 billion range, with capital spending forecast at $30 billion to $35 billion.
Analysts surveyed by TipRanks expect a loss of 91 cents per share on revenue close to $1.97 billion. Options traders are pricing in a swing of about 18.7% in either direction after the report. Zacks noted that while EPS remains murky, traders are likely to zero in on backlog conversion metrics.
Bullish sentiment has been building. Bank of America's Tal Liani raised his price target to $140 from $120, highlighting data-center activation, remaining performance obligations, and margins as key focus areas. Jefferies' Brent Thill lifted his target to $160 from $120, calling CoreWeave's valuation 'compelling relative to its strategic importance.'
CoreWeave has fresh momentum from major deals. Meta Platforms signed a $21 billion agreement for cloud capacity through December 2032, with early access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. 'Leading companies are coming to us for their most demanding workloads,' CEO Michael Intrator said. Anthropic also inked a multi-year deal to use CoreWeave's infrastructure for its Claude AI models, though no dollar figures were disclosed. Jane Street committed roughly $6 billion for cloud services and backed that with a $1 billion equity investment at $109 per share.
These deals diversify CoreWeave's customer base. Microsoft accounted for roughly 67% of revenue last year, but Meta now ranks among its biggest clients. The broader environment is favorable: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are collectively on track to pour more than $700 billion into AI this year, a major tailwind for dedicated GPU cloud providers like CoreWeave. However, competition for chips, energy, and data-center real estate remains intense.
Execution remains the critical risk. CoreWeave's latest annual filing highlights the complexity and heavy costs of data-center buildouts, including construction setbacks, GPU shortages, cooling system delays, funding gaps, permit issues, and difficulty finding sites with adequate power. Any of these could push revenue into future quarters. Debt is also a heavy load: the company carried over $14 billion in long-term debt as of December, and first-quarter interest expense could reach $590 million, making any unused capacity an expensive problem.
CFO Nitin Agrawal told investors the backlog is now more than four times what it was at the start of 2025. Investors will be watching Thursday's report for signs that optimism is materializing in actual power usage, booked revenue, and margins.
