CoreWeave Revenue Jumps 168% as AI Demand Defies Doubts

CoreWeave beat Wall Street’s revenue forecasts on Tuesday, reporting third-quarter sales of $3.66 billion as demand for artificial intelligence computing held firm despite weeks of market anxiety about the cost of building it.

The AI cloud provider, which rents out computing power built on advanced Nvidia chips, said revenue rose 168% from $1.37 billion a year earlier. The result topped the $3.55 billion average analyst estimate compiled by LSEG, according to Reuters reporting, and came in above the top of the company’s own forecast for the quarter. Shares rose about 5% in after-hours trading to roughly $51.50, and were up more than 10% in premarket trading on Wednesday, according to CNBC.

Chief executive Michael Intrator called it a “breakout quarter” for the company. “CoreWeave delivered an exceptional third quarter,” he said in the results release.

A beat on the top line

The quarter, which ended on 30 September, offered the clearest evidence yet that customers are still spending heavily on AI infrastructure. CoreWeave’s revenue backlog — signed contracts not yet recognised as sales — reached a record $132.5 billion at the end of September, up from $104 billion three months earlier.

The company’s customer list includes Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic, and it operates about 52 data centres worldwide with more than 1.7 gigawatts of active capacity. Demand continues to run well ahead of supply: management told analysts that qualified demand was roughly ten times available capacity through the end of 2027, with demand for 2028 already several times larger than the capacity on offer.

The result also landed in a week of strong numbers across the chip supply chain, from TSMC’s record October revenue to AMD’s AI chip outlook, and it followed Anthropic’s $1.4 trillion IPO pricing, which underlined how much capital is still flowing into the sector.

The bill for the buildout

The growth came at a steep price. CoreWeave recorded a net loss of $709 million in the quarter, against a loss of $110 million a year earlier, as interest costs and the pace of investment weighed on the bottom line. Operating income was $207 million, while net interest expense reached $846 million. The company has never turned a profit, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters.

CoreWeave reported total debt of about $46.9 billion at the end of September, and yields on some of its bonds have topped 16% as investors demanded higher returns for lending to a company spending tens of billions on data centres. The stock had lost more than 40% of its value over the previous month before Tuesday’s results, as investors rotated out of AI infrastructure names and questioned whether the buildout could pay for itself.

Management moved to answer the financing question directly. Finance chief Nitin Agrawal told analysts: “At current yields, we do not intend to issue additional parent-level unsecured debt through 2027.” Instead, the company expects about $9 billion of customer prepayments and deposits over the next three months to help fund construction, and said it would need less than $5 billion of additional capital through 2027.

Guidance raised across the board

CoreWeave lifted its full-year forecasts on almost every measure. It now expects 2026 revenue of $13.0 billion to $13.3 billion, up from $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion, and raised its adjusted operating income guidance to $1.275 billion to $1.375 billion — a 26% increase at the midpoint. Adjusted operating income in the third quarter was $379 million, a 10% margin and well above the $200 million to $260 million the company had guided.

The company also raised its target for annualised run-rate revenue at the end of the year to $20 billion to $21 billion, and lifted the low end of its 2026 capital expenditure range to $37 billion, from $35 billion, while keeping the top end at $39 billion. The higher spending reflects infrastructure being delivered to customers sooner than planned.

The loss per share of $1.00 was narrower than the $1.16 analysts had expected, according to Zacks’ earnings call summary.

What investors are watching next

The central question now is whether CoreWeave can convert its enormous backlog into profits before its debts come due. The company said it expects to achieve adjusted profitability in the first half of 2028 — a target investors will test against each quarterly report.

Fourth-quarter interest expense is expected to run at $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion, a reminder that the financing burden will not ease quickly. But Tuesday’s numbers eased the more immediate fear: that demand for AI computing was fading. The backlog, the guidance raise and the prepayments all point the other way.

For a company that has become a symbol of the AI infrastructure boom — and of the doubts surrounding it — the quarter bought time and credibility. Whether the economics catch up with the growth is the test that still lies ahead.