CoreWeave shares closed the shortened trading week at $117.95, up 17.3% from the prior Friday, as the AI cloud provider gears up for its addition to the Nasdaq-100 index on Monday. The rally comes amid a flurry of financing activity that has investors weighing the company's growth prospects against its mounting debt burden.
The stock gained 2.38% on Thursday, marking the last regular session before U.S. markets closed for Juneteenth. The move follows Nasdaq's announcement that CoreWeave, along with Astera Labs, Nebius, Rocket Lab, and Teradyne, will join the index, replacing Charter Communications, Cognizant, Insmed, Verisk Analytics, and Zscaler. The Nasdaq-100 tracks more than $800 billion in assets, and passive index funds are expected to rebalance their portfolios accordingly.
CoreWeave's surge has been supported by broader market optimism, with the Nasdaq Composite rising 1.9% on Thursday and 2.4% for the week. The S&P 500 also gained 1.1% on Thursday, according to AP market data. However, CoreWeave's rally has outpaced the broader indexes, raising questions about valuation.
The company's backlog, which represents revenue from customer contracts not yet recognized, stood at $99.4 billion as of March 31. First-quarter revenue was $2.08 billion, with adjusted EBITDA of $1.16 billion. CoreWeave has lined up major clients including Meta, Anthropic, and Jane Street, signaling strong demand for its AI cloud services.
This week, CoreWeave demonstrated its technical capabilities by training the DeepSeek-V3 671B benchmark in 2.02 minutes using 8,192 Nvidia GB300 NVL72 GPUs. Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of product and engineering, emphasized that the results came from production infrastructure, not a benchmark-only setup. Brendan Burke, research director at Futurum Research, called the achievement a testament to CoreWeave's full-stack AI expertise.
Despite the bullish narrative, risks are substantial. CoreWeave reported a first-quarter net loss of $740 million, including $536 million in net interest expense. As of March 31, the company had $7.55 billion in current debt and $17.31 billion in non-current debt, excluding lease obligations. The company's business model depends on heavy upfront capital expenditures, and any slowdown in AI demand or client deployments could strain its leverage.
On Thursday, CoreWeave closed a private financing of $1.25 billion in 9.625% senior notes and €2 billion in 8.500% senior notes, both maturing in 2032. Proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes, which may include repaying existing debt. The high interest rates on these notes underscore the market's perception of risk.
Looking ahead, Monday's Nasdaq-100 inclusion could provide a short-term boost from index-tracking funds. However, the focus will quickly shift to execution: how quickly CoreWeave can convert its backlog into cash, whether debt buyers remain comfortable, and whether AI infrastructure spending continues to grow fast enough to support the current stock price.
