CoreWeave Stock Jumps 14% After Revenue More Than Doubles, But Losses and Debt Keep Growing Too

CoreWeave's revenue more than doubled in the second quarter and Wall Street rewarded it. Shares jumped 14% in extended trading Tuesday after the AI infrastructure company beat expectations across the board, according to CNBC.

The company reported $2.58 billion in quarterly revenue, up 112% from a year earlier and above the $2.56 billion analysts polled by LSEG had expected. CoreWeave's revenue backlog, the value of contracts customers have committed to but haven't yet paid out, hit $104 billion at quarter's end, up 246% year over year, according to MarketBeat.

That backlog number doesn't even include everything. CoreWeave said it added more than $25 billion in new customer commitments in the early weeks of the third quarter alone, on top of the $104 billion figure, per CNBC.

The Losses Are Growing Too

CoreWeave's net loss widened to $626 million for the quarter, up from $290 million a year ago, according to CNBC. Interest expense alone jumped to $640 million from $267 million a year earlier, MarketBeat reported, as the company piles on debt to pay for data centers and Nvidia chips.

As of quarter's end, CoreWeave carried $35 billion in debt on its balance sheet, according to CNBC. A LinkedIn breakdown of the company's filings put more precise numbers on it: $6.235 billion in current recourse debt, $25.170 billion in noncurrent recourse debt, and $5.524 billion in cash on hand. In the first six months of 2026, CoreWeave spent $14.117 billion on property and equipment, compared to $3.860 billion over the same stretch last year.

CoreWeave is scaling fast because customers want the compute now, but it's financing that growth with debt at a scale that would sink most companies. Unlike Amazon, Google and Microsoft, its rivals in the cloud business, CoreWeave isn't profitable, CNBC noted.

Margins Are Actually Improving

The company isn't ignoring the losses, and it's pointing to real progress on efficiency. Adjusted operating income hit $128 million this quarter, up from just $21 million in the first quarter, though still down from $200 million a year earlier, according to MarketBeat. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $1.5 billion, up from $753 million a year ago, for a 59% margin.

CEO Mike Intrator called it "an important inflection point" in comments to MarketWatch, arguing that as CoreWeave's installed base of data centers grows, the temporary margin hit from bringing new facilities online matters less to the overall financial picture. CFO Nitin Agrawal told analysts the company saw margin expansion even before a roughly 25% price increase across product categories in July.

CoreWeave also raised its full-year guidance. It now expects $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion in 2026 revenue and $960 million to $1.15 billion in adjusted operating income, up from its May forecast of $12 billion to $13 billion in revenue and $900 million to $1.1 billion in operating income, per CNBC. Capital spending guidance climbed too, to $35 billion-$39 billion for the year, up from $31 billion-$35 billion.

The Political Backdrop

CoreWeave's growth is running into local resistance. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order in July establishing a moratorium on new large-scale data centers, CNBC reported.

Intrator downplayed the immediate financial impact on a call with analysts: "None of those numbers will be impacted by the regulatory pushback as of today." But he acknowledged the broader trend is a headwind, telling CNBC separately, "There is no question that when parts of the U.S. become unwilling to even engage in those conversations, that it becomes more challenging."

Local governments pushing back on power-hungry, land-intensive facilities isn't irrational. Data centers strain electric grids and water supplies, and residents in affected areas have raised those complaints publicly. Whether that translates into a real constraint on companies like CoreWeave, or just noise Intrator can wave off for now, isn't settled yet.

New Customers, New Chips

CoreWeave added notable clients this quarter, including Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-owned drug discovery company founded by Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and trading firms Flow Traders and IMC Trading, according to MarketWatch. Meta also committed an additional $21 billion in spending with CoreWeave during the quarter, CNBC reported.

The company became the first cloud provider to test and run Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin NVL72 platform, MarketWatch reported, reinforcing CoreWeave's position as Nvidia's go-to infrastructure partner.

A $104 billion backlog signals demand, not cash in hand. It's contingent on CoreWeave actually delivering that capacity, and on customers still needing it when the bill comes due. With $35 billion in debt and quarterly interest payments now exceeding $600 million, CoreWeave's bet is that AI compute demand keeps outrunning supply. If it doesn't, the leverage that's fueling this growth becomes the problem instead of the engine.