NEW YORK, Jan 5, 2026, 12:40 PM EST — Regular session
- CoreWeave shares were little changed after an early rally following a D.A. Davidson upgrade.
- The firm’s new $68 target still sits below the market price, keeping valuation and leverage in focus.
- Investors are looking to February results for updated spending and cash-flow signals.
CoreWeave shares pared an early jump and were down 0.1% at $79.21 in midday trading on Monday after D.A. Davidson upgraded the AI-focused cloud company.
The call matters because CoreWeave has become a high-beta proxy for how long the AI buildout can stay on a debt-funded footing. Traders have been quick to fade rallies when bullish demand signals collide with questions about capital intensity, or how much cash a company must spend just to keep growing.
CoreWeave touched $84.44 earlier in the session before sliding back below $80, underscoring how sensitive the stock remains to shifts in sentiment rather than day-to-day operating headlines.
D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria raised CoreWeave to “Neutral” from “Underperform” and lifted his price target to $68 from $36, even as that target still implies downside from current levels. Luria has been among the company’s more persistent skeptics, and he warned of an “inevitable reckoning” for the model. 1
Luria said CoreWeave’s returns on capital — the profit generated for each dollar invested — remain too low relative to its cost of capital, or what it pays to borrow and raise money. He pegged return on capital around 4% versus a 9% cost of capital, according to Barron’s. 1
CoreWeave, which listed on Nasdaq in March 2025, rents out high-end computing capacity used to train and run AI models and has marketed multi-year contracts that aim to reduce demand swings. 2
The company has leaned on big-ticket commitments to support that buildout. CoreWeave said in September that the total contract value of its agreements with OpenAI stands at about $22.4 billion. 3
CoreWeave’s last earnings update in November showed how execution hiccups can still jar the stock: the company cut its 2025 revenue forecast after a delay at a third-party data center partner, Reuters reported at the time. 4
The risk for bulls is that funding costs rise or customer deployments slow, leaving expensive hardware underused and squeezing margins — a particular worry for a company that is still scaling and has drawn scrutiny for leverage. Any renewed delays in bringing capacity online could also test confidence in forward projections.
