By Adam Levine
CoreWeave will report first-quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon, a marker on its journey as it races to become a major cloud provider on the scale of Amazon Web Services.
Wall Street analysts project first-quarter sales doubling from last year to almost $2 billion. But the company's large depreciation and interest expenses have led to expectations of a 91 cent adjusted loss per share, up from 60 cents last year.
CoreWeave invented the neocloud business. It's a pure-play on artificial-intelligence data centers, only hosting Nvidia's industry-leading AI servers. CoreWeave has a very close relationship with Nvidia, which is its most important supplier, an investor and also a customer.
Neoclouds are trying to surf the 60-foot wave of AI computing demand and quickly scale up to being large enterprises. CoreWeave had $16 million in 2022 sales, and three years later its revenue was $5.1 billion. Wall Street analysts expect that figure to jump to $12.5 billion this year.
That sort of triple-digit sales growth is built on the back of a multiyear backlog, which at last count was $67 billion. Microsoft was the company's first big customer, and it was still responsible for two-thirds of 2025 revenue, but that's set to broaden out as big contracts with Meta Platforms and OpenAI ramp up.
But this sort of momentum comes at a very high cost. This year CoreWeave expects to have between $30 billion and $35 billion in capital expenditures, which it funds primarily through debt, but also operating cash flows and equity sales. The company had $21 billion in debt at the end of last year, plus another $8.4 billion in lease liabilities. The company has contracted to add $38.5 billion in leases in the coming years.
So far this year CoreWeave has secured over $21 billion in financing through equity sales, two delayed-draw borrowing facilities, senior notes, and convertible debt. Though the senior notes pay nearly 10% interest, the larger of the delayed-draw facilities came with a floating rate around 6%.
The lower interest rate on the largest of the loans was an important step for the company. Interest expense is a key part of CoreWeave's income statement, so much so that it provides quarterly guidance for it. In the first quarter, the company expects interest expense to be 28% of revenue, at the midpoint of the guidance range. Bringing the company's weighted average interest rate down is crucial for future success, and it dropped by three percentage points in 2025.
This is the CoreWeave cycle. Sales and backlog growth give investors confidence to finance the next round of growth at a lower cost of capital. A successful 2026 may keep that money flowing next year.
Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com
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May 07, 2026 04:00 ET (08:00 GMT)
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