CoreWeave Posts $3.66 Billion Quarter and Lifts 2026 Outlook

CoreWeave reported quarterly revenue of $3.66 billion on Tuesday, beating the $3.55 billion consensus from LSEG analysts and lifting its 2026 guidance in a quarter that recorded a net loss of $709 million.

The stock rose slightly in extended trading. The result lands at a volatile moment for the company and its neocloud peers, as the market sours on the AI trade and as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the central figure in the global buildout, faces a scandal tied to an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

What did the numbers show?

The company's revenue grew 168% from roughly $1.36 billion in the year-earlier quarter, according to a statement. The net loss of $709 million, equal to $1.27 per share, compares with a net loss of $110 million a year earlier. Adjusted earnings exclude stock-based compensation.

Against LSEG consensus:

• Earnings per share: a loss of $1.27. It is not immediately clear whether the loss is comparable to the LSEG consensus of $1.16.
• Revenue: $3.66 billion versus $3.55 billion expected.

The scale of the loss alongside the scale of the growth defines the CoreWeave story: the company is spending enormous sums on capacity ahead of contracted demand, and the market is now questioning how long that equation holds.

How much did guidance rise?

Executives raised their 2026 forecast. They now see $1.275 billion to $1.375 billion in adjusted operating income on $13 billion to $13.3 billion in revenue. Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha were looking for $1.07 billion in adjusted operating income, and analysts polled by LSEG had expected $12.86 billion in 2026 revenue.

In August, CoreWeave projected $960 million to $1.15 billion in adjusted operating income and $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion in revenue. The new ranges raise both ends of each measure, a signal that management sees contracted demand firming rather than softening.

The raise matters beyond CoreWeave. The company is one of the most sensitive public proxies for AI infrastructure spending, and its guidance is one of the few forward-looking data points investors can price directly after weeks of losses across the sector.

Why is the stock down despite the beat?

CoreWeave has lost over 40% of its value in the past month as investors rotate out of companies most closely tied to AI infrastructure. Rising interest rates have pushed lenders out of the market, raising concerns about ongoing access to capital. Some CoreWeave bond yields recently topped 16%.

That financing pressure is the crux of the bear case. CoreWeave owed almost $47 billion in debt at the end of the third quarter, according to the statement. The business model depends on borrowing against long-dated contracts to fund data center construction, and a 16% bond yield makes each new project more expensive to finance.

The company's response is to keep building. Management still anticipates 1.85 gigawatts in active power by the end of 2026. CoreWeave is targeting $37 billion to $39 billion in full-year capital expenditures, which would imply 155% growth at the middle of the range. Analysts polled by Visible Alpha were expecting $37.69 billion.

Like its bigger cloud rivals such as Amazon and Oracle, CoreWeave is rushing to bolster computing capacity for clients. The counterweight to the debt load is the demand signal: CoreWeave now sits on a $132.5 billion revenue backlog, up from $104 billion as of June. That backlog has grown by roughly $28.5 billion in a single quarter.

What pressure is coming from Washington and Wall Street?

Nvidia looms over the entire sector. CoreWeave, fellow neocloud Nebius, and several other providers of cloud-based graphics processing units rely particularly on Nvidia, which supplies the GPUs as well as necessary capital to the whole ecosystem. Nvidia shares have dropped nearly 10% to start the week as the Huang affair raises pressure on the company in Washington, D.C.

Nvidia's board said on Tuesday that it hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate Huang and determine whether national security or company secrets were compromised. The investigation puts the sector's central supplier and financier under formal scrutiny at the moment its customers most need stable access to capital and chips.

Political friction is building at home as well. Last week, voters in the U.S., where CoreWeave derives most of its revenue, rejected dozens of initiatives on data center development. Local opposition to data center construction raises a practical constraint on the 1.85-gigawatt target that no amount of capital can easily bypass: the projects need land, power and permits.

What comes next for CoreWeave and its peers?

Two dates frame the near term. Nebius, whose stock is down by an amount similar to CoreWeave's decline over the past month, is scheduled to report earnings on Thursday. Nebius shares got a small boost from CoreWeave's results, suggesting investors read the quarter as evidence of sector-wide demand rather than one company's execution.

Next week, key customer Anthropic is scheduled to debut on the Nasdaq. In its updated IPO prospectus filed Tuesday, Anthropic indicated that it could be valued at around $1.4 trillion after its share sale. The listing will give the market a direct read on how investors price the AI application layer that sits on infrastructure CoreWeave sells, and a strong debut would reinforce the backlog underpinning CoreWeave's guidance.

During the quarter, CoreWeave also said it would establish its first data centers in Asia and announced the Forge service for running and evaluating AI models. The Asia expansion extends the company beyond its core U.S. revenue base; Forge adds a software layer to what has been a raw compute business.

Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET. The questions on that call will likely concentrate on the $47 billion debt load, the financing costs implied by bond yields above 16%, and whether the $132.5 billion backlog can keep compounding fast enough to outrun them.

The quarter's message is that demand for AI infrastructure remains strong. The market's message, in a 40% monthly drawdown, is that financing that demand has become the harder problem.