NEW YORK, May 8, 2026, 08:08 EDT
Shares of CoreWeave Inc. slid roughly 7% in pre-market trading Friday. The AI cloud company disappointed, guiding second-quarter revenue below analysts’ $2.7 billion estimate and bumping up the lower end of its 2026 spending target. Bloomberg reported the new revenue range lagged Wall Street’s expectations.
This is a key moment for CoreWeave, which sits at the heart of the AI infrastructure story. Demand remains intense. Now, the question for investors: can CoreWeave turn that appetite into actual cash flow fast enough to cover chips, data centers, power, and its debt load?
CoreWeave falls into the “neocloud” camp—those upstart cloud outfits leasing out specialized computing power for AI projects, not the wider software ranges seen at the big cloud names. Reuters reported a spike in demand for neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius, as tech firms scramble for the hardware and cloud muscle needed to run AI models. Reuters
CoreWeave posted first-quarter revenue of $2.078 billion, jumping from $982 million a year ago. Operating expenses, though, surged past double to $2.222 billion. That pushed the net loss deeper, reaching $740 million compared with $315 million last year. As of March 31, revenue backlog came in at $99.4 billion—a tally of signed future sales.
The company’s outlook did little to ease nerves. CoreWeave is projecting second-quarter revenue between $2.45 billion and $2.60 billion, with adjusted operating income somewhere from $30 million up to $90 million. Interest expense lands in a $650 million to $730 million range, while capital expenditures are seen jumping to $7 billion to $9 billion. Looking further ahead, guidance for 2026 calls for revenue of $12 billion to $13 billion and capital spending between $31 billion and $35 billion.
Finance chief Nitin Agrawal told analysts the company bumped up the low end of its full-year capital expenditure forecast due to “increases in component pricing.” As for the margin pressure, Agrawal called it “timing-based, not economic”—costs are hitting the books ahead of any revenue from new capacity coming online. Investing.com
Chief Executive Michael Intrator dismissed the sharp drop as mere “market noise,” telling Reuters the firm was on what he called a “fantastic ramp.” “I’m building a company,” he added. Andrew Rocco, a stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research, drew parallels to Amazon’s formative days and said CoreWeave may end up a “dominant player in the AI infrastructure industry” — as long as investors stick around. Reuters
Bulls have the customer roster in their corner. CoreWeave notched a fresh $21 billion cloud-capacity pledge from Meta, plus a $6 billion agreement with Jane Street and a deal with Anthropic, according to Reuters. The company also booked over 400 megawatts of new contracted power this quarter, bumping its total contracted load past 3.5 gigawatts.
Not every analyst was downbeat. Wells Fargo stuck with its Overweight call and bumped up the price target to $155, according to Seeking Alpha. Shares slumped on the weaker Q2 outlook.
There’s a real risk costs climb before things get simpler. CoreWeave faces pricier components, shortages, and a swelling interest tab—potentially forcing the company to raise more cash before its contracts actually pay out. The Wall Street Journal reported CoreWeave is bracing for second-quarter interest expenses between $650 million and $730 million, with capital spending projected at $7 billion to $9 billion.
Right now, the company’s got the AI infrastructure demand investors have been chasing. Still, Friday’s move made something else clear: a $99 billion backlog doesn’t mean profit, and Wall Street’s waiting to see if that spending curve actually shifts.
