New York, Jan 12, 2026, 11:43 EST — Regular session.
- CoreWeave shares rose about 11% in late morning trading, outpacing the broader tech sector.
- Moody’s said data-center buildouts will need at least $3 trillion over the next five years.
- Goldman Sachs assumed coverage with a Neutral rating and an $86 price target.
CoreWeave shares jumped nearly 11% on Monday, extending a sharp rebound from early lows as investors latched onto fresh Wall Street coverage and a bullish call on data-center spending. The stock was last up 11% at $88.94, after swinging between $78.48 and $89.87, while the Nasdaq 100 tracker Invesco QQQ was little changed.
The move matters because CoreWeave sits at the center of a debate that has rattled AI infrastructure names: how long the spending wave lasts, and whether the debt used to build data centers pays off before the next technology cycle hits.
Monday’s surge also comes as investors look for signals on financing conditions. Big-ticket buildouts live and die on credit, and the sector’s equity moves can turn on a single research note.
CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, runs a cloud platform built to manage artificial intelligence infrastructure, including model training and inference — the process of running AI systems after they are trained. (Reuters)
Moody’s Ratings said in a report on Monday that at least $3 trillion will flow into data-center-related investments over the next five years, spanning servers, facilities and new power capacity. It said six U.S. “hyperscalers” — giant cloud and data-center operators including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Oracle, Meta and CoreWeave — are on track to hit $500 billion in data-center investments this year. Moody’s senior vice president John Medina put the demand shift plainly: “A ChatGPT that didn’t exist three years ago now uses a lot of compute.” (Insurance Journal)
Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges assumed coverage of CoreWeave with a Neutral rating and a $86 price target, according to a StreetInsider report. In the note, she wrote that CoreWeave’s “purpose-built architecture provides a significant competitive advantage” at the high end of AI compute, but stayed cautious due to execution risk and what Goldman called “outsized debt,” pegging leverage at roughly six times net debt to trailing 12-month EBITDA as of the third quarter of 2025. (Net debt is debt minus cash; EBITDA is a cash-flow proxy before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.) (Streetinsider)
CoreWeave has also been leaning into next-generation chips. In a Jan. 5 release, the company said it plans to add Nvidia’s Rubin platform to its AI cloud in the second half of 2026, with CEO Michael Intrator calling Rubin “an important advancement” as AI shifts toward “more sophisticated reasoning and agentic use cases.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, in the same release, said the companies are “building the AI factories of the future.” (CoreWeave)
Still, the rally does not erase the core risk for investors: the buildout is capital hungry, and any stumble — delays in bringing capacity online, softer demand, or tighter credit — can hit equity holders fast when a company is carrying heavy leverage.
Moody’s itself noted that the vast amounts of debt needed for the AI boom have raised bubble concerns, even as it said demand shows no sign of slowing in the near term.
Traders’ next macro check is Tuesday’s U.S. Consumer Price Index report for December 2025, due at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, which can shift rate bets and borrowing-cost assumptions that matter for leveraged growth names. (Bls)
