Livingston, New Jersey, May 10, 2026, 5:05 PM EDT
On May 8, ARK funds snapped up 113,076 shares of CoreWeave, spending roughly $12.9 million after the Nvidia-backed cloud name tumbled 11% to $114.15 on softer short-term guidance. Wells Fargo’s Michael Turrin bumped his price target up to $155 from $135 while maintaining his Overweight call.
CoreWeave is drawing a line in the sand for the AI infrastructure story — investors are being asked to swallow significant upfront costs and deeper losses now, banking on future contracted revenues and a profit ramp that doesn’t really kick in until 2026. First quarter numbers hammer this home: a $99.4 billion revenue backlog sits on the books, but operating expenses came in at $2.22 billion and the net loss hit $740 million.
CoreWeave now expects second-quarter revenue between $2.45 billion and $2.6 billion—Reuters noted that’s short of what analysts were looking for—even as the company bumped up the low end of its 2026 capital spending target to $31 billion from $30 billion. Capital expenditure refers to money invested in building and outfitting assets like data centers.
CoreWeave’s first-quarter revenue jumped to $2.078 billion, more than double last year’s $982 million. The company said it broke through 1 gigawatt of active power, while contracted power climbed by another 400 megawatts, now topping 3.5 gigawatts—tracking electricity capacity for its AI data center expansion.
CoreWeave’s co-founder, chairman and CEO Mike Intrator described it as the company’s “strongest bookings quarter.” He pointed out that customers are shifting to inference—where trained AI models actually generate responses—rather than just staying focused on training. CoreWeave
Investors kept unloading shares. CoreWeave finished the session at $114.15, giving it a market cap just over $60.2 billion. The stock had started at $118.36 and slipped as low as $110.63 during the day.
Turrin’s note focused less on the weaker second-quarter outlook, emphasizing backlog and capacity instead. “CRWV continues to execute,” he said, but with the trimmed outlook, a lot now rides on results in the second half, TheStreet reported. TheStreet
Elsewhere on Wall Street, the response wasn’t quite unanimous. Truist bumped its price target up to $131 from $85, though it stuck with its Hold rating. The firm pointed to the stock’s impressive year-to-date climb and noted that demand continues to be strong, with capacity fully booked for this year.
Bulls have latched onto CoreWeave’s expanding customer roster. The company recently locked in several new contracts with Meta, counting a $21 billion pledge among them, and secured a multi-year agreement with Anthropic. It’s also deepened ties with Jane Street, Cohere, and Mistral.
The company belongs to a newer breed of AI-focused cloud players, or “neoclouds,” offering GPU rentals—the chips powering AI model training and inference. According to Reuters, with tech firms scrambling for both hardware and cloud bandwidth to run AI, demand is surging for outfits like CoreWeave and Nebius. Reuters
Timing and cost are both in the crosshairs here. In its recent quarterly filing, CoreWeave flagged that upcoming investments might need hefty debt or equity raises, cautioning that setbacks—ranging from power or supply hiccups to pricier electricity—could weigh on performance. Leaning on equity means possible dilution for shareholders, while more debt ups the stakes if revenue doesn’t show up fast enough.
Demand isn’t really the issue here—it’s there. The bigger concern is whether CoreWeave can convert a nearly $100 billion backlog into revenue at a pace that investors want, especially with eyes on component costs, interest payments, and execution through the rest of the year. Andrew Rocco, stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research, compared the playbook to Amazon’s early days: profits can wait, scale comes first.
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