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CoreWeave shares fell in after-hours trading on Wednesday as the artificial intelligence data centre operator issued quarterly profit guidance that missed Wall Street forecasts.
The US group, which leases computing capacity to tech companies that are building AI models, said operating income in the second quarter would be between $140mn and $170mn, below analyst estimates of $192mn. CoreWeave shares were down 7.8 per cent after-hours.
Chief executive Michael Intrator said during a call with analysts that demand for its data centres was accelerating. Chief financial officer Nitin Agrawal attributed the lower profit guidance to bringing forward some spending to meet demand. Agrawal said CoreWeave’s capital expenditure would be between $20bn and $23bn this year.
CoreWeave reported a 420 per cent rise in revenue in its first quarter as a listed company, beating Wall Street forecasts. It posted revenues of $982mn for the first three months of 2025, above analyst estimates of $860mn. Its shares had risen 6.6 per cent on Wednesday.
Net losses for the quarter were $315mn, 143 per cent higher than the same period last year, when they were $129mn.
Intrator said: “Demand for our platform is robust and accelerating as AI leaders seek the highly performant AI cloud infrastructure required for the most advanced applications. We are scaling as fast as possible to capture that demand.”
The New Jersey-based company’s initial public offering in March was drastically downsized. It had targeted raising $2.7bn at $47-$55 a share, but slashed that to $1.5bn at $40 a share, following investor concern about its large debt burden and a softening market for AI infrastructure.
CoreWeave has grown rapidly amid an explosion in AI in the past two years, with 33 data centres in the US and Europe. But it has borrowed extensively to fuel its growth, raising $12.9bn of debt in the past two years to build data centres as demand for products and services powered by generative AI has boomed.
It has in the past raised the bulk of its debt secured against its stash of more than 250,000 Nvidia graphics processing units, the computer chips that have become the world’s hottest commodity for companies building and running AI systems.
The Financial Times reported last week that CoreWeave was preparing a bond offering to raise at least $1.5bn that could be used to finance its operations or refinance part of its debt.
Since the start of the year, CoreWeave has signed a deal with OpenAI worth $11.2bn and acquired Weights & Biases, an AI developer platform, for about $1.7bn. It said it had $14.7bn in “remaining performance obligations” — contracts that have been secured but not yet fulfilled.
The OpenAI deal was not included in that figure because CoreWeave had “not yet finalised the accounting treatment” for the deal, Agrawal said on Wednesday.
On the analyst call, Intrator said CoreWeave had secured a $4bn contract to expand its services to a large AI enterprise but did not give further details. He added that CoreWeave had deployed Nvidia’s high-performance Grace Blackwell super chips to customers including IBM, Mistral and Cohere.
