CoreWeave (CRWV) Stock on December 10, 2025: Debt Jitters, ‘Circular’ AI Deals and What Wall Street Expects Next

As of December 10, 2025 (10.12.2025), CoreWeave, Inc. is once again at the center of the AI trade — with a $2.25 billion convertible bond sale, a fiercely defended debt‑heavy strategy, and analysts still calling for big upside despite intense volatility.

CoreWeave stock today: price, performance and volatility

CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWV) is trading around $90.66 per share on December 10, 2025, up roughly 5% intraday, giving the company a market capitalization of about $45 billion. ^[1]

Fresh analysis from Simply Wall St released today notes that: ^[2]

The latest share price is $90.66
1‑week return is +14.24% (a sharp rebound)
3‑month return is ‑19.55% (after a deep drawdown)
Year‑to‑date gains remain firmly in high‑growth territory

CoreWeave listed on Nasdaq in March 2025 at $40 a share, and even after a brutal 45% drop in November, the stock is still more than double its IPO price. ^[3]

In other words:

2025 so far has been a roller coaster.
CRWV has swung from “AI darling” up more than 300% at one point to “bubble risk” and back to “maybe it’s on sale.” ^[4]

The big December 10 story: debt, risk — and a fresh defense from the CEO

Today’s CoreWeave narrative is built around three intertwined headlines:

A $2.25 billion convertible bond that adds to an already heavy debt load. ^[5]
A Fortune Brainstorm AI appearance where CEO Michael Intrator vigorously defended CoreWeave’s controversial “circular” AI deals and post‑IPO volatility. ^[6]
A new Reuters Breakingviews column warning that highly leveraged data‑center tenants like CoreWeave could become a weak link in the AI infrastructure boom. ^[7]

Combined, they paint a picture of a company racing to lock in AI demand while testing investors’ tolerance for complexity and leverage.

1. The $2.25 billion convertible notes: cheap money or ticking time bomb?

On December 9, CoreWeave priced an upsized $2.25 billion private offering of 1.75% convertible senior notes due 2031. The deal was initially planned at $2.0 billion but was enlarged on strong demand, with an option for underwriters to buy an additional $337.5 million.

Key terms from the company’s own release:

Principal: $2.25 billion, potentially ~$2.59 billion if the option is fully exercised
Coupon: 1.75%, paid semi‑annually
Maturity: December 1, 2031
Initial conversion price: about $107.80 per share
Conversion premium: ~25% above the $86.24 close on December 8
Capped calls: CoreWeave bought “capped call” options with an initial cap of $215.60 per share to limit dilution if the stock soars

Barron’s reports that this convertible push comes on top of roughly $14 billion of existing debt and that CoreWeave exited Q3 with about $6.7 billion in liquidity, later boosted by another $3.3 billion of debt issuance. Management plans about $13 billion of capital expenditure in 2025 and close to $30 billion in 2026, meaning virtually all of that build‑out must be financed.

Investors’ reaction has been whiplash‑like:

When the convertible was first floated at $2 billion, CRWV slid more than 5% to around $83.80, with concerns over dilution and rising leverage.
After the terms and upsizing were announced, the stock rebounded more than 5%, even as credit default swap (CDS) spreads on CoreWeave debt widened sharply, signaling higher perceived credit risk.

For equity holders, the deal is a double‑edged sword:

Pro: Lower‑cost capital (1.75% vs earlier 9–9.25% bonds) to fund AI cloud expansion and match prepaid compute commitments.
Con: Higher leverage, more complex capital structure, and potential dilution if the stock trades consistently above the $107.80 conversion price.

2. CEO Michael Intrator’s defense of “circular” AI deals

At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco, CoreWeave co‑founder and CEO Michael Intrator took direct aim at critics who say the company’s AI financing and commercial relationships are dangerously “circular.”

According to a detailed recap from MLQ.ai and syndicated Fortune summaries:

Intrator argued that CoreWeave’s web of agreements with Nvidia, OpenAI and other partners represents “industry collaboration” rather than financial engineering.
He framed CoreWeave’s large inventory of Nvidia GPUs as both an operational asset and a financing tool — effectively collateral used to raise debt and scale new data centers.
Nvidia owns an equity stake in CoreWeave, CoreWeave raises GPU‑backed debt and buys large amounts of Nvidia hardware, and Nvidia has agreed to buy excess CoreWeave GPU cloud capacity through 2032, creating a tightly woven ecosystem.
OpenAI, meanwhile, has committed billions of dollars in multi‑year cloud contracts and has received equity in CoreWeave, deepening the cross‑ownership and contracted demand.

Intrator also pushed back on the stock’s volatility since the March IPO, portraying swings as normal for a capital‑intensive disruptor and insisting the IPO was “incredibly successful” despite choppy trading and tariff‑related macro headwinds.

The debate over circular AI financing

MLQ.ai pulls together broader commentary on these structures:

Supporters say circular deals help fund enormous data‑center projects, align incentives, and secure long‑term compute supply for AI developers.
Critics, including some short sellers and academics, warn that when investors, suppliers, and customers are all intertwined, it can:
- Blur the line between genuine demand and revenue fueled by partner financing
- Concentrate counterparty risk in a small group of AI giants
- Make it harder to assess how sustainable growth really is

CoreWeave sits at the heart of that debate: its CEO frames these arrangements as “working together,” while skeptics worry about a feedback loop of recycled capital in the AI ecosystem.

3. Breakingviews warns: risky tenants could choke off the AI data‑center boom

A fresh Reuters Breakingviews column today zooms out from CoreWeave to the entire AI data‑center financing machine – and puts “neo‑clouds” like CoreWeave under the microscope.

Key points:

Global data‑center capacity may need to grow sixfold by 2035, requiring an estimated $3 trillion in infrastructure investment between 2025 and 2028.
Big cloud players like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have strong balance sheets; they lease or build data centers with relatively low credit risk.
New AI‑focused cloud tenants — CoreWeave, Nebius and others — lease long‑dated capacity (often 15+ years) while many of their customer contracts run only four to five years, creating a timing mismatch.

Breakingviews uses Applied Digital’s North Dakota project for CoreWeave as a case study:

Under optimistic assumptions about interest rates and terminal value, developers can earn an attractive internal rate of return.
Modestly higher interest costs or lower exit valuations quickly erode returns, especially when the tenant carries a non‑investment‑grade (“junk”) credit rating and rising CDS spreads — a description that fits CoreWeave today.

The punchline: the biggest risk to the AI infrastructure boom may not be demand, but tightening credit if financiers become nervous about the solvency of highly leveraged AI tenants.

4. Under the hood: Q3 2025 results and growth trajectory

CoreWeave’s most recent quarter (Q3 2025, reported November 10) shows why bulls still like the story — and why bears obsess over the balance sheet.

Explosive top‑line, improving but still negative bottom‑line

From CoreWeave’s Q3 release and Reuters coverage:

Revenue: $1.36 billion, up from $584 million a year earlier (more than doubling year‑on‑year).
Revenue backlog: jumped to $55.6 billion, nearly doubling in a year as the company signed multi‑year deals.
GAAP operating income: about $51.9 million, but
Net loss: still roughly $110 million, largely due to $310.6 million in net interest expense in the quarter.
Adjusted EBITDA: $838 million with a 61% margin, highlighting strong underlying cash generation before interest and non‑cash items.

CFO Nitin Agrawal trimmed 2025 revenue guidance to a range of $5.05–$5.15 billion, down from $5.15–$5.35 billion, citing delays at a third‑party data‑center partner. The affected customer extended its contract, so revenue is delayed rather than lost, but the guidance cut still knocked the stock more than 6% in after‑hours trading when it was announced.

Big customers, bigger commitments

CoreWeave’s Q3 update and subsequent reporting highlight a who’s‑who of AI demand:

Meta Platforms: Up to $14.2 billion multi‑year deal to power next‑generation AI workloads.
OpenAI: Expanded agreements up to $22.4 billion in total commitments for AI compute.
Nvidia: A $6.3 billion strategic collaboration to scale GPU infrastructure and accelerate AI innovation.
Vast Data: A $1.17 billion commercial agreement making Vast the primary data platform for CoreWeave’s cloud, further tying together the AI infrastructure stack.

Operationally, CoreWeave says it:

Added about 120 MW of active power in Q3, bringing total active capacity to roughly 590 MW
Raised total contracted power to approximately 2.9 GW
Expanded investments, including:
- Up to $6 billion for a Lancaster, Pennsylvania data center (starting at 100 MW, expandable to 300 MW)
- An additional £1.5 billion commitment in the UK, lifting its total there to £2.5 billion

This is the essence of the bull case: CoreWeave is wiring itself into the fundamental plumbing of generative AI.

Q2 reminder: growth vs. losses

Back in Q2 2025, Reuters highlighted the other side of the story:

Shares fell about 11% on August 13 after CoreWeave posted a bigger‑than‑expected loss, with operating expenses almost quadrupling to $1.19 billion.
Analysts flagged concerns about customer concentration, heavy capital needs, and whether the company can generate enough profit to service its debt.
At that time, CoreWeave already had around $8 billion of debt, and Q2 commentary warned that it did not yet generate enough profit to comfortably cover interest, let alone equity returns.

The Q3 results show progress — higher revenue, a narrower loss, strong adjusted EBITDA — but interest costs and capital intensity still dominate the income statement.

5. How expensive is CRWV? Fresh valuations from December 10

Today’s Simply Wall St note puts some numbers on the valuation debate:

CoreWeave trades at roughly 10.5× trailing sales, versus about 2.5× for the broader U.S. IT sector.
Compared with a basket of high‑growth AI and cloud peers, however, the peer average price‑to‑sales is about 30.5×, and Simply Wall St’s “fair” P/S estimate for CRWV is 28.8×.
On that metric, the service labels CRWV “UNDERVALUED” relative to close peers.
Its internal discounted‑cash‑flow (DCF) model, though, suggests the shares are deeply overvalued, underscoring how sensitive long‑term valuations are to growth and margin assumptions.

Other recent commentary dives into the same tension:

A Motley Fool piece on November 17 argued that CoreWeave is “arguably the best cloud platform for AI infrastructure,” noting 134% revenue growth to $1.3 billion in Q3, a GAAP loss per share improving to $0.22, and cash from operations more than doubling to $1.7 billion. It pointed out that CRWV was then trading around 7.5× sales, below its historical 13× average and below some peers, despite forecasts for ~92% annual earnings growth through 2027.
Another article on December 3 dissected the 45.3% plunge in November, calling CoreWeave a poster child for the AI “bubble vs opportunity” debate: valued at roughly 7× expected 2025 revenue and boasting a $55+ billion backlog, but with profitability still in the distance.

Even among bullish analysts, the message is clear: CRWV’s valuation already assumes that a large chunk of its massive backlog turns into profitable revenue.

6. What Wall Street expects: consensus price targets and ratings

Despite the volatility and debt overhang, the sell‑side is still broadly optimistic on CoreWeave — at least on paper.

Across multiple tracking services, 12‑month price targets cluster in a fairly tight band:

StockAnalysis: 25 analysts, average target $127.84, implying about +41% upside from today’s price. Consensus rating: “Buy.”
MarketBeat: 33 analysts, average target $129.47, range $32–$200, implying roughly +43% upside.
Investing.com: 25 analysts, average target $132.2, range $36–$208; consensus rating “Buy.”
MarketScreener: 28 analysts, average target $132.20 and a consensus of “Outperform.”
TipRanks: 24 analysts over the last three months, average target $133.77 (high $180, low $36), implying around +55% upside from a recent reference price of $86.24.
Yahoo Finance / MLQ price‑target tools: similar averages around $132–$136, with lows in the mid‑30s and highs just over $200–$245.

Overall, that suggests Wall Street’s base case is still double‑digit annual revenue growth and a stock in the low‑to‑mid $130s within a year, from around $90 today — but there is huge dispersion between the most bullish and most bearish targets.

Notable analyst and investor commentary

A few recent pieces flesh out the range of views:

Freedom Capital Markets initiated coverage earlier this month with a “Buy” rating and a $100 price target, calling the recent sell‑off “fear‑driven rather than fundamentally driven.”
A Seeking Alpha contributor in “Buy CoreWeave’s ‘Code Red’ Moment” maintained a Strong Buy rating, arguing that:
- 2025 revenue guidance of about $5.1 billion still represents huge growth
- The $55+ billion backlog and forecast ~135% revenue growth in 2026 support significant upside
- At current levels, CRWV trades around 5× estimated 2026 revenue, which the author views as attractive for the growth profile.
- But they also flagged execution risks around high debt, thin operating margins, and capacity delays.
A separate Motley Fool piece titled “Why Did CoreWeave Stock Plunge 45% in November?” was more cautious, emphasizing that valuations ran ahead of fundamentals and that market sentiment may continue to reset even if AI demand stays strong.
An earlier long‑form forecast from Financhill suggested that a mid‑$100s share price a year out is “plausible” if CoreWeave hits the midpoint of guidance, maintains its backlog conversion rate, and navigates lock‑up expirations without a flood of insider selling.

In short: Wall Street still leans bullish, but both the range of targets and the tone of recent analysis show growing unease about leverage, cyclicality and execution.

7. The bull case for CoreWeave stock

Putting today’s news in context, the bullish narrative around CRWV typically rests on five pillars:

Category leadership in AI‑native cloud
- CoreWeave designs GPU‑dense data centers specifically for AI training and inference, and research outfit SemiAnalysis has ranked its AI cloud performance ahead of both other neoclouds and even traditional hyperscalers like AWS and Azure in some benchmarks.
Massive, contracted demand and long‑term backlog
- A $55.6 billion revenue backlog, with marquee customers like Meta, OpenAI, and a “leading hyperscaler,” gives line of sight into multi‑year revenue streams.
- CoreWeave is also threading itself deep into the data‑layer via Vast Data’s $1.17 billion contract, positioning its stack as critical infrastructure rather than a commodity cloud.
Nvidia alignment and equity stake
- Nvidia has taken a 24‑million‑share stake worth about $3 billion at the time of reporting, and has expanded both financial and commercial ties with CoreWeave.
- A $6.3 billion strategic collaboration plus GPU‑backed financing structures make CoreWeave a central node in Nvidia’s push to own more of the AI value chain.
Improving profitability metrics
- Net losses are shrinking even as revenue explodes, and adjusted EBITDA margins north of 60% in Q3 suggest that, before interest and depreciation, the underlying business can be extremely profitable.
Analyst support and perceived mispricing vs peers
- With consensus targets clustered around $130+ and most services rating the stock a “Buy” or “Outperform”, many on Wall Street see the current 10.5× sales multiple as reasonable — or even cheap — relative to other fast‑growing AI infrastructure names.

If AI spending remains aggressive and CoreWeave continues to convert backlog into revenue without major credit or operational hiccups, the bullish case says today’s wobbles will look like a volatile pause in a much longer uptrend.

8. The bear case: leverage, concentration and the circular‑deal overhang

The bearish view zeroes in on risk, complexity and the possibility that early AI euphoria has over‑discounted future growth.

Key concerns include:

Very high leverage
- CoreWeave entered Q4 with about $14 billion of debt and is now layering on another $2.25 billion in convertible notes.
- Q3 interest expense of $310.6 million dwarfed GAAP operating income, keeping the company in a net loss even with robust EBITDA.
- Academic analysis of AI data‑center project finance notes that Intrator has openly called debt “the fuel for this company,” underscoring how central leverage is to the strategy.
Credit‑market nerves
- CDS spreads on CoreWeave’s 5‑year debt have spiked from roughly 250–300 basis points to over 600–700 bps in recent weeks, signaling that credit investors are demanding much richer compensation for risk.
- Breakingviews warns that if lenders pull back or financing costs rise further, long‑term projects built around tenants like CoreWeave could suddenly look uneconomic, chilling the AI build‑out.
Customer and partner concentration
- Revenue is heavily tied to a handful of hyperscalers and AI labs — notably Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia‑linked ecosystems.
- Reuters’ Q2 piece highlighted analyst worries that such dependence, combined with widening losses and high capex, makes CoreWeave vulnerable if a major partner shifts strategy or insources capacity.
Execution and capacity risk
- Q3 guidance was cut because a third‑party data‑center partner fell behind schedule, not because demand weakened — but it showed how fragile near‑term revenue timing can be.
- CoreWeave’s business now spans 33+ AI data centers across the U.S. and Europe; keeping that build‑out on budget and on time under intense pressure for capacity is non‑trivial.
Valuation stretch and AI‑bubble risk
- Even after November’s 45% slide, articles from Motley Fool and others point out that CRWV still trades at more than 7× expected 2025 revenue — a level that leaves little room for major missteps.
- If AI spending cools, or if regulators and investors become more skeptical of circular financing, the market could compress these multiples further, regardless of near‑term growth.

In this view, CoreWeave is less a straightforward growth story and more a high‑beta bet on the entire AI infrastructure cycle and the continued willingness of lenders to bankroll it.

9. What today’s news means for CoreWeave investors

Taken together, the December 10, 2025 coverage shifts the focus from pure growth to the structure of that growth:

The convertible notes make the funding model cheaper and more flexible, but also bigger and more complex.
The CEO’s public defense of circular deals signals that CoreWeave is not backing away from its debt‑heavy, partner‑interwoven strategy — it is leaning into it and asking markets to re‑rate that model as collaborative rather than synthetic.
Breakingviews’ warning is a reminder that these same structures could become pressure points if interest rates or risk appetites move the wrong way.
Fresh valuation work from Simply Wall St and others shows how easy it is for reasonable models to land on opposite conclusions — “undervalued vs peers” on one metric, “deeply overvalued” on another.

For now, the consensus is still that CoreWeave grows into its valuation: most analysts see 40–50% upside over 12 months and maintain Buy/Outperform ratings. But the range of outcomes — from deeply discounted bear targets in the $30s to bull targets above $200 — underlines how much uncertainty is baked into CRWV.

10. What to watch next

If you’re tracking CoreWeave (whether or not you own the stock), the latest news suggests a few key catalysts and questions for 2026:

Closing of the convertible deal
- How the notes trade after the expected December 11 settlement and whether the capped‑call hedging produces noticeable flows in the stock.
Q4 2025 and 2026 guidance
- Will management maintain the $5.05–$5.15 billion revenue range for 2025 and provide a 2026 outlook that supports the $130‑plus price targets?
Credit markets and CDS spreads
- Do spreads tighten if CoreWeave executes smoothly, or do they widen further, validating Breakingviews’ concerns about tenant risk?
Customer diversification and new contracts
- Are new enterprise and mid‑market customers starting to meaningfully diversify revenue away from a handful of tech giants?
Regulatory and disclosure scrutiny of circular deals
- As circular AI financing structures spread, regulators and rating agencies may push for clearer disclosure on cross‑ownership, purchase obligations, and backstop guarantees. How CoreWeave responds could influence its cost of capital.

Important disclaimer

This article is for informational and news purposes only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. CoreWeave, Inc. (CRWV) is a highly volatile stock in a rapidly changing sector; investors should do their own research and consider their financial situation, risk tolerance, and, if needed, seek advice from a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decisions.