CoreWeave Revenue Doubles to $2.6 Billion, Backlog Hits $104B

CoreWeave’s second-quarter revenue more than doubled to $2.575 billion and its backlog swelled past $104 billion, though a wider net loss and mounting debt tempered how far investors were willing to celebrate.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue climbed 112 percent to $2.575 billion and the backlog surged 246 percent to roughly $104 billion, cementing CoreWeave’s position at the center of the AI infrastructure buildout.
• Net loss widened to $626 million as interest expense on nearly $35 billion in debt more than doubled, even as adjusted EBITDA held near a 59 percent margin.
• Management raised 2026 revenue guidance to $12.4-$13.2 billion and capital spending guidance to $35-$39 billion, betting that scale will eventually produce discipline.

The Numbers

CoreWeave arrived at its second-quarter results carrying an unusual burden: expectations so elevated that simply doubling revenue risked reading, to some investors, as merely adequate. The company cleared that bar with room to spare. Revenue for the three months ended June 30 reached $2.575 billion, a 112 percent increase from the $1.212 billion recorded a year earlier, edging past the roughly $2.56 billion Wall Street had modeled and confirming that appetite for AI computing capacity shows little sign of leveling off.

What distinguished this quarter from CoreWeave’s prior earnings was the composure with which the market absorbed the news. Shares had already gained ground into the print, closing the regular session 2.4 percent higher at $90.32, before extending that move once the results landed. The stock advanced roughly 14 percent in after-hours trading, with a separate tracker placing the after-hours peak near $102, a gain of about 13 percent. That the rally built gradually, rather than exploding in the reflexive spikes that have followed some past CoreWeave prints, suggests investors are beginning to underwrite the company’s growth with more scrutiny than instinct.

The Price of Scale

Beneath the headline strength sat a less flattering picture of what that growth presently costs. Adjusted EBITDA reached $1.51 billion, nearly double the $753 million posted a year earlier, though the margin narrowed to 59 percent from 62 percent, a modest compression in isolation but a meaningful one given its direction. GAAP operating income turned negative, with a $49 million operating loss replacing the $19 million of operating income reported in the same quarter last year, as technology and infrastructure spending scaled in step with, and at moments ahead of, revenue itself.

The larger drag, however, came not from operations but from the other side of the balance sheet. Net interest expense reached $640 million, more than double the $267 million recorded a year earlier, pushing the net loss to $626 million, or $1.14 per share, up from $290 million, or $0.60 per share, in the prior-year period. CoreWeave remains, in the plainest possible terms, a company borrowing heavily to build faster than its revenue alone could finance, and the second quarter offered the clearest evidence yet of what that financing actually costs.

Financing the Buildout

The capital program behind those losses is difficult to describe modestly. CoreWeave spent $6.4 billion on property and equipment during the quarter alone, and $14.1 billion over the first half of the year, expanding total assets to $77.1 billion, up from $49.3 billion at the close of 2025. Financing that expansion required more than $10 billion in new unsecured debt and convertible bonds during the quarter, including the company’s first Eurobond issuance, alongside a $3.1 billion delayed-draw term loan that the company describes as the first of its kind publicly syndicated against high-performance computing infrastructure.

By quarter’s end, recourse and non-recourse obligations on CoreWeave’s balance sheet totaled close to $35 billion, a debt load CNBC framed with characteristic bluntness: the company’s revenue is surging as the AI boom continues, even as it carries a substantial debt burden. Cash reserves strengthened in parallel, reaching $5.5 billion, up from $3.1 billion at the start of the year, aided by a $1 billion strategic investment from Jane Street. Whether that liquidity cushion proves adequate will depend less on any single quarter than on how quickly newly energized capacity converts into recognized revenue.

The Architecture of the Backlog

If CoreWeave’s income statement invites scrutiny, its backlog invites something closer to reassurance. Revenue backlog surged 246 percent year over year to approximately $104.2 billion, a figure that notably excludes more than $25 billion in net new customer commitments added during the early weeks of the third quarter. Contract duration lengthened as well, with agreements running longer than 48 months growing from 10 percent to 21 percent of the total mix, evidence that customers are increasingly willing to commit capital years ahead of delivery.

Two contracts, both struck in April, explain much of that shift. Meta Platforms expanded its relationship with CoreWeave into a long-term agreement worth approximately $21 billion, running through December 2032, layered atop a prior $14.2 billion contract signed in September 2025, bringing Meta’s cumulative commitment to roughly $35.2 billion. A day later, CoreWeave disclosed a multi-year agreement with Anthropic to support the development and deployment of its Claude family of AI models, a deal whose undisclosed financial terms did little to diminish its symbolic weight: CoreWeave now counts nine of the world’s ten leading AI model developers among its customers.

The Outlook

Management’s response to the quarter was escalation rather than caution. CoreWeave raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion, up from a prior range of $12 billion to $13 billion, while lifting capital expenditure guidance to $35 billion to $39 billion, up from $31 billion to $35 billion previously. The company also raised its year-end target for active power capacity to more than 1.85 gigawatts and its exit annualized revenue run rate to $18.5 billion to $19.5 billion, guidance that reads less like reassurance than a wager that the market still underestimates how durable AI infrastructure demand has become.

That wager retains believers, though not unanimous ones. JPMorgan raised its price target to $110 while maintaining a Neutral rating, and Deutsche Bank held a Buy rating with a $150 target ahead of the print, and the spread across the broader analyst community, ranging from a high of $200 to a low of $32, says as much about the unresolved debate as any single forecast could. CoreWeave has answered, decisively, the question of whether demand for AI compute is real. What remains unanswered, and what the coming quarters will test in earnest, is whether that demand can be converted into the kind of durable profitability that ultimately separates infrastructure builders from infrastructure financiers.