CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator cites ‘sold out’ capacity as revenue more than doubles and backlog swells to $104 billion
Fortune Amanda Gerut
CoreWeave says demand is so hot its capacity is basically sold out. Revenue jumped, backlog hit $104.2 billion, and the stock popped after hours.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Amanda Gerut — read the original for the full story.
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CoreWeave just turned in a quarter that looked built to calm the AI-bubble crowd, at least for a day. Revenue more than doubled to $2.58 billion in the second quarter, beating the $2.56 billion analysts expected. The stock jumped more than 14% in after-hours trading Tuesday.
The bigger headline may be the backlog. CoreWeave said it had $104.2 billion in revenue backlog, up 246% from a year earlier, and that still leaves out about $25 billion in new customer commitments it picked up early in the third quarter. CEO Michael Intrator called near-term capacity “effectively sold out,” which is a pretty blunt way of saying customers keep showing up faster than the company can serve them.
That demand is coming from the AI infrastructure rush, and CoreWeave is trying to sell the picks and shovels. It rents access to Nvidia’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips, and Intrator said those prices are hitting “new highs,” while older chips are also being rented at levels not seen in years. Nvidia, which owns close to 13% of CoreWeave, had just announced a $500 billion financing plan for AI infrastructure with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock and Brookfield Asset Management.
But the business is still expensive to run. CoreWeave posted a $626 million loss in the quarter, wider than the $260 million loss a year earlier, hit in part by $640 million of net interest expense. Even so, it reported $128 million in adjusted operating income, and executives argued that inference work — running AI models rather than training them — can squeeze more value out of its chips and data centers.
There’s also the familiar question hanging over all those GPUs on the balance sheet. CoreWeave said it had $46.7 billion of property and equipment, mostly GPUs, while some investors worry newer versions will make older inventory look stale fast. Intrator pushed back on fears that local pushback on data centers will slow the company, saying 18 states have restrictions or are considering them, but that demand won’t take a hit.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
CoreWeave is doing the thing AI companies all love to do: turn scarcity into a business model and call it strategy. That works until the hardware ages, the power bills arrive, and everyone else has also built a data center with a shiny press release attached. The market keeps treating “sold out” like a moat, when sometimes it’s just a very expensive line outside the door.
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