CoreWeave shares jumped in the US pre-market after announcing that revenue more than doubled in the second quarter as demand for AI computing power continued to surge, though losses from its debt-fuelled expansion continued to mount.
There would have been a level of nervousness going into earnings given the choppiness in AI-related stocks recently, but CoreWeave’s numbers did more than settle the nerves.
“CoreWeave reached an important inflection point this quarter as our scale began to translate into expanding operating leverage. Customer demand is accelerating, as enterprise adoption broadens and we continue to deepen our technology platform,” said Michael Intrator, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of CoreWeave.
“CoreWeave is built on the conviction that AI is foundational to every industry and that realizing its full potential requires a purpose-built platform. This quarter reinforced that conviction.”
The Nasdaq-listed cloud provider, which rents out Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure, reported revenue of $2.58bn for the three months to 30 June, up from $1.21bn a year earlier. Analysts had predicted revenue of $2.56bn, so the beat wasn’t massive, but it was enough to spark a rally in the stock.
Its revenue backlog stood at about $104bn, and the company said it had added more than $25bn of further customer commitments in early July.
But the cost of building out at speed weighed on the bottom line. CoreWeave slipped to an operating loss of $49m, from a small profit a year earlier, and its net loss widened to $626m from $290m, driven largely by interest costs that more than doubled to $640m as it leaned heavily on borrowing to fund its data-centre expansion.
Adjusted EBITDA rose to $1.51bn, though the margin edged down to 59%.
The company kept expanding its capacity and customer base, lifting active power by nearly 500 megawatts to 1.5 gigawatts and signing up names including Caterpillar, Grammarly and Isomorphic Labs.
CoreWeave shares rose 14% in the US premarket.