CoreWeave Q1 revenue beats but wider loss and soft guidance sink stock 11%

CoreWeave (CRWV) reported a wider-than-expected first-quarter loss of $1.40 per share on Thursday and issued current-quarter revenue guidance below Wall Street estimates, sending the AI cloud provider’s stock down 11.4 per cent in Friday trading.

Revenue for the three months to March rose 112 per cent from a year earlier to $2.08 billion, ahead of the $1.97 billion consensus. The bottom-line miss and a Q2 revenue forecast of $2.45 billion to $2.6 billion, which fell short of the $2.7 billion analysts had pencilled in, overshadowed the top-line beat. Full-year guidance was reaffirmed at $12 billion to $13 billion in revenue. The midpoint of $12.5 billion sits just below the $12.56 billion consensus.

“Q1 was a transformational quarter for CoreWeave. We delivered our strongest quarter for customer bookings, signing more than $40 billion of new commitments,” chief executive Mike Intrator told analysts on the post-earnings call.

The company ended the quarter with a total revenue backlog of $99.4 billion, up roughly 50 per cent sequentially and about four times the level a year earlier. Ten customers now hold commitments exceeding $1 billion each. New additions in the quarter included Anthropic and high-frequency trading firms Jane Street and Hudson River Trading. Meta signed a $21 billion agreement announced in early April. Commitments from non-investment grade AI-native companies and foundation labs now account for less than 30 per cent of the backlog. A year ago that share was larger.

What the print showed

The net loss widened to $740 million from $315 million a year earlier. Interest expense jumped to $536 million from $264 million in the same quarter last year. The company guided for $650 million to $730 million in Q2 interest costs as the debt load swells to fund its data-centre build-out. CoreWeave carries a debt-to-equity ratio of 8.94 and a current ratio of 0.46. Short-term obligations exceed liquid assets. No debt maturities land before 2029.

Adjusted EBITDA hit $1.2 billion, a 56 per cent margin. Adjusted operating income was $21 million. That is a 1 per cent margin. Chief financial officer Nitin Agrawal called it the trough. Stock-based compensation totalled $153 million.

Capital expenditure guidance for the full year was raised to $31 billion to $35 billion. Intrator attributed the increase to component pricing. “The overwhelming majority of it is locked in already,” he said. Q2 alone will consume $7 billion to $9 billion.

The margin story

Agrawal framed the thin operating margin as a timing issue, not a structural one. CoreWeave takes delivery of powered data-centre shells and begins paying lease and power costs one to two months before the hardware produces revenue. Every new 300-megawatt deployment drags on reported margins in the quarter it arrives.

“By month three in these deployments, we are typically generating revenue and the contribution margins stabilise, normalising to a ramped contract in about mid-twenties,” Agrawal said. “Q1 was the trough of our margin story. We remain on track for sequential margin expansion through the balance of the year.”

CoreWeave expects to exit 2026 with low double-digit adjusted operating margins. It lifted the low end of its exit 2026 annualised run-rate revenue range by $1 billion, to $18 billion to $19 billion. CoreWeave is targeting more than $30 billion in annualised run-rate revenue by the end of 2027. More than 75 per cent of that figure is already under contract.

Building the infrastructure

CoreWeave surpassed 1 gigawatt of active power during the quarter and has more than 3.5 gigawatts of contracted power. A “substantial majority” is expected online by the end of 2027. It added more than 400 megawatts of new contracted power in Q1 and secured roughly 2 gigawatts over the preceding 12 months. The long-term target is more than 8 gigawatts by 2030. Its first self-build data-centre site is expected online later this year.

On the financing side, CoreWeave has raised more than $20 billion in debt and equity year to date. The centrepiece was an $8.5 billion delayed-draw term loan, the first investment-grade-rated facility backed by high-performance computing infrastructure. It achieved an A-minus equivalent rating and a cost of less than 6 per cent. Nvidia put in another $2 billion of equity during the quarter. A subsequent DDTL tranche, backed by contracts with OpenAI and Cohere, priced 50 basis points inside its initial marketing range.

The stock closed Friday at roughly $132, about 29 per cent below its 52-week high of $187. The earnings follow a busy stretch for AI-linked names, with Block also reporting a Q1 beat and raising its full-year outlook in after-hours trading.