CoreWeave "Sells Out" of Silicon, Doubles Revenue to $2.58B and Pops Stonk 14%

Call your AI bubble friends and rub it in… 

CoreWeave has never made a dollar of profit in its life, and Tuesday night it told the richest customers on Earth that the three-year-old chips now cost more than they did new. Nobody flinched as revenue doubled to $2.58 billion, the adjusted loss printed at $1.03 against the $1.20 the Street had braced for, and the stock ripped 14% after the bell. 

So what happened? CEO Michael Intrator traded carbon credits for fifteen years and ran a natural gas hedge fund before he ever plugged in a graphics card, and that resume is the entire company. CoreWeave borrows, buys Nvidia GPUs, stacks them in a warehouse, and charges by the hour.

But the real swagger lives in the forward book, where backlog hit $104 billion (signed contracts, not money in the bank), roughly eight times everything the company will book all year, and that figure doesn't count the $25 billion-plus that walked in after the quarter closed. Meaning, Q3 guidance of $3.4 to $3.6 billion would be 158% growth. Which is absolutely mind blowing. New Blackwell and Vera Rubin racks are pricing at record highs, and last generation's silicon is renting at or above where it sat years ago. (Try that with a laptop.) I always figured a three-year-old GPU is supposed to rent like a three-year-old Corolla. Wrongo. 

CoreWeave found the Ticketmaster model for silicon and started charging resale on last season's seats. CFO Nitin Agrawal described the mechanism as Nvidia jacks our price, we jack yours, and you have nowhere else to f*cking go “passing component price hikes down to customers”. 

But, but, but… there’s still some blood in the water here. Net loss widened to $626 million from $290 million, because every dollar CoreWeave books gets mainlined straight back into Jensen's register. $35 billion of debt. Capex guided up to $39 billion. Free cash flow at negative $5.7 billion while net interest expense alone ran $640 million for the quarter, more than the entire net loss, which means the lenders ate better than the shareholders did. Strip the interest out and this thing prints money. The problem though… nobody gets to strip the interest out. 

Which brings me to whose bankrolling this grift… Nvidia sells CoreWeave the chips, holds the stock, and is contractually on the hook through 2032 to buy back any capacity CoreWeave can't rent to somebody else. The three biggest names in AI are circle-jerking the same dollar and booking it as demand. The bond market has noticed, which is how a B+ rating blew up Blue Owl's $4 billion data center financing earlier this year. Not great, Bob. 

Regardless though, CoreWeave ended the quarter with 1.5 gigawatts of live power and wants 1.85 by New Year's, and every watt has to land in a county that gets a vote. Kathy Hochul dropped the first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers in July, New York residential power is up about 68% since 2019, and "we're creating jobs" does not un-f*ck an electric bill (ask Ulster County how the AI revolution is polling). However, CoreWeave says none of his numbers move on regulatory pushback "as of today."

As of today is doing an ungodly amount of heavy lifting in that sentence. Spoiler: He's sold out through 2028. Now he has to go find a town that'll let him plug it in. Place your bets accordingly, friends. Until next time… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.