CoreWeave Has Been Dealmaking and the Stock Has Been Rising. It's the 'Neocloud of Choice.' -- Barrons.com

By Nate Wolf

CoreWeave stock spiked again Monday after a 24% jump last week. Wall Street believes it deserves every percentage point.

Macquarie analyst Paul Golding joined a growing chorus of CoreWeave believers, upgrading the stock to Outperform from Neutral and lifting his price target to $125 from $92 in a research note. The bump followed a couple of artificial-intelligence infrastructure deals that have investors excited.

CoreWeave last week unveiled an expanded $21 billion agreement to provide Meta Platforms with AI cloud capacity through 2032. It followed that up with a multiyear deal with AI lab Anthropic -- a new customer -- for an undisclosed amount.

After climbing 3.5% on Thursday and 11% on Friday, shares were up another 8.6% to $110.72 on Monday.

CoreWeave was once viewed as an overflow option for a small group of customers, namely Microsoft and OpenAI, seeking rapid access to Nvidia chips. The new deals, though, "suggest to us CoreWeave will increasingly become a structural player into the next decade," Golding wrote.

The company's ability to re-contract its cloud infrastructure once initial deals roll over may come into question as hyperscalers build in-house chips and expand their own compute capacity, Macquarie said. However, CoreWeave may be so "entrenched in the ecosystem" by that point that hyperscalers don't want to risk scaling back.

In fact, demand appears to be accelerating as customers move from training AI models to inference -- using them to complete tasks and solve problems -- said Roth Capital analyst Rohit Kulkarni. The Meta deal, in particular, focused on the transition to inference.

"Recent events further reconfirm that CoreWeave is moving aggressively to convert AI demand into long-duration contracts, benchmark-backed performance claims, and large-scale financing capacity," Kulkarni wrote in a research note Monday.

Roth reiterated a Buy rating on CoreWeave stock and hiked its price target to $135 from $110.

D.A. Davidson, once a harsh critic of CoreWeave, turned even more bullish, lifting its price target on the stock to $175 from $125 and maintaining a Buy rating. The rationale was similar: CoreWeave has become a core part of the AI story.

"CoreWeave is becoming the neocloud of choice for the frontier labs whom make up a vast majority of the accelerating compute demand that we believe continues for the foreseeable future," analyst Alexander Platt wrote.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com

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April 13, 2026 10:31 ET (14:31 GMT)

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