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CoreWeave Revenue More Than Triples to $3.66 Billion as AI Cloud Provider Beats Estimates and Raises Outlook

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A modern AI data center with rows of server racks and glowing network lights, representing CoreWeave's third-quarter 2026 earnings report.

CoreWeave, the fast-growing company that rents out computing power for artificial intelligence, reported third-quarter revenue of $3.66 billion on Tuesday, up 168 percent from a year earlier and above Wall Street’s expectations, as demand for AI infrastructure kept surging. The Livingston, New Jersey-based company also raised its full-year outlook, sending its shares higher in after-hours trading after a brutal month in which the stock had lost about half its value.

The report, released after the market closed on Tuesday, November 10, was one of the most closely watched earnings releases of the season for the AI trade. CoreWeave has become a symbol of the boom in so-called neocloud companies — firms that borrow heavily to build data centers packed with Nvidia chips and rent them to AI labs and enterprises. That model has produced explosive revenue growth, but it has also left investors asking whether the debt-fueled expansion can last.

The numbers: record revenue, wider loss

CoreWeave’s revenue for the three months ended September 30 was $3.661 billion, compared with $1.365 billion in the same quarter last year. The figure beat the roughly $3.55 billion analysts had expected, according to Zacks, and it was more than $1 billion higher than the $2.575 billion the company reported in the second quarter.

Profitability, however, moved in the opposite direction. The company reported a net loss of $709 million, or $1.27 per diluted share, compared with a loss of $110 million, or 22 cents per share, a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, the loss was $1.00 per share, narrower than the $1.16 loss analysts had expected, according to Zacks — a 13.79 percent earnings surprise.

The gap between surging revenue and deepening losses comes down to the cost of the buildout. Net interest expense reached $846 million in the quarter, up from $310 million a year earlier, as CoreWeave’s borrowing costs climbed. GAAP operating income rose to $207 million, a 6 percent margin, from $52 million a year earlier. Adjusted operating income was $379 million, a 10 percent margin that the company said reached double digits a quarter ahead of its own plan. Adjusted EBITDA, a measure of cash earnings that excludes interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, was $2.256 billion at a 62 percent margin.

“This was a breakout quarter for CoreWeave, with revenue increasing by more than $1 billion sequentially and adjusted operating margins reaching double digits a quarter ahead of plan,” chief executive Michael Intrator said in the earnings release. He added that the company’s growth is supported by “multiple sources of funding, including financing backed by customer contracts, operating cash flow, and approximately $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits expected in the next three months alone.”

A $132.5 billion backlog — and a $37 billion spending plan

The number investors watch most closely at CoreWeave is its revenue backlog — the value of committed customer contracts — and it grew again. Backlog stood at approximately $132.5 billion as of September 30, up from $104.2 billion at the end of June. The company defines backlog as remaining performance obligations plus other amounts it expects to recognize under committed contracts.

CoreWeave also raised its guidance for the rest of the year. It now expects full-year 2026 revenue of $13.0 billion to $13.3 billion, and adjusted operating income of $1.275 billion to $1.375 billion — a 26 percent increase at the midpoint compared with its prior guidance. It raised its annualized run-rate revenue guidance to $20 billion to $21 billion to exit 2026.

The spending, however, is not slowing. CoreWeave now expects full-year 2026 capital expenditures of $37 billion to $39 billion, raising the low end of its prior range of $35 billion to $39 billion, because it expects to deploy infrastructure and deliver it to customers sooner than planned. It forecast interest expense of $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion for the fourth quarter alone.

The company also reported that it added more than 200 megawatts of active power during the quarter to reach over 1.7 gigawatts, doubling its active footprint since the start of the year, and grew total contracted power by more than 900 megawatts to over 4.6 gigawatts. It still expects more than 1.85 gigawatts of active power by year-end.

The debt question that has haunted the stock

CoreWeave’s results arrive after weeks in which the company’s finances, not its growth, dominated the conversation. The stock closed Tuesday at $48.73, down 0.5 percent on the day. It had fallen to a 52-week low of $40.58 on November 5 and is down roughly 50 percent over the past month and about 65 percent from its 52-week high of $138.25 in May. The company’s total debt stood at nearly $47 billion at the end of the third quarter, according to figures cited by Reuters, and its corporate bonds have at times yielded above 16 percent. The cost of insuring its debt against default rose about 50 percent in a month to more than 1,240 basis points, according to market data cited in recent reporting.

CNBC reported on November 9 that CoreWeave was confronting what analysts have called a “doom cycle” narrative — the fear that rising borrowing costs could force the company to keep raising expensive debt to fund data centers, even as its customers’ own spending plans come under scrutiny. Brokerages including Morgan Stanley, UBS and HSBC said on Monday that last week’s selloff in AI-related stocks had gone too far, and the shares rose 5.9 percent that day.

Tuesday’s report gives both sides of that argument something to point to. The revenue beat, the raised guidance and the $132.5 billion backlog show demand is not slowing. But the $846 million quarterly interest bill — nearly triple a year earlier — and the $37 billion to $39 billion capital spending plan show why the financing question will not go away.

CoreWeave has moved to strengthen its funding position. During the quarter it raised approximately $4.2 billion through an upsized offering of convertible senior notes, established an at-the-market equity program for up to 35 million shares of Class A common stock, and closed a $2.6 billion financing facility designed to support shorter-duration customer contracts. Intrator’s emphasis on the roughly $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits expected in the next three months was aimed squarely at investors worried about how the buildout is paid for.

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Why this matters

CoreWeave is one of the purest publicly traded bets on the AI infrastructure boom. Unlike the big hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — it does almost nothing but rent out GPU computing power, mostly built on Nvidia hardware, to AI companies. Its customers include OpenAI, Perplexity, Cohere and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the company says it is trusted by nine of the ten leading foundation model providers.

That concentration is what makes its earnings a bellwether. If demand for AI computing stays strong, CoreWeave’s backlog keeps growing and its customers keep prepaying. If hyperscaler spending slows or AI labs cut back, a company carrying tens of billions of dollars in debt and planning tens of billions more in spending would feel it first. The same debate has weighed on the wider AI trade this month: Nvidia, whose chips power CoreWeave’s data centers, has fallen sharply as Nvidia’s board opened an independent probe into chief executive Jensen Huang and shareholders filed a lawsuit, while Anthropic set a $70–$78 IPO price range for a listing expected later this month.

The broader market backdrop is also turning less friendly. A hotter-than-expected October inflation report on Tuesday morning pushed up expectations that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates by half a percentage point at its December meeting, which would make borrowing more expensive for debt-heavy companies like CoreWeave.

Latest developments

CoreWeave’s management is discussing the results on a conference call that began at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, and investors will be listening for any update on financing costs, customer demand and the pace of data center construction. A transcript of the call will be posted on the company’s investor relations website.

The company also highlighted several technology milestones in the quarter. It brought online multi-rack deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, with the first production workloads for the AI coding company Cognition achieving 4.8 times greater token throughput than the previous GB200 NVL72 platform. It launched CoreWeave Forge, an AI development environment, and said it became the only provider to earn SemiAnalysis’ Platinum ClusterMAX rating three consecutive times. New customer wins included Canva, Wayve, Substack and Serve Robotics, and it expanded work with defense contractor Leidos and on a biological research project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much revenue did CoreWeave report in the third quarter of 2026?

CoreWeave reported revenue of $3.661 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, up 168 percent from $1.365 billion a year earlier. The result beat the roughly $3.55 billion analysts had expected and was more than $1 billion higher than the second quarter’s $2.575 billion.

Why is CoreWeave still losing money despite record revenue?

The main reason is the cost of funding its data center expansion. Net interest expense was $846 million in the quarter, up from $310 million a year earlier, and the company reported a net loss of $709 million. CoreWeave plans $37 billion to $39 billion in capital expenditures this year to build AI infrastructure for customers.

What is CoreWeave’s revenue backlog?

Revenue backlog was approximately $132.5 billion as of September 30, 2026, up from $104.2 billion at the end of June. It represents remaining performance obligations plus other amounts CoreWeave expects to recognize under committed customer contracts, subject to infrastructure being delivered and available.

What did CoreWeave say about its outlook for 2026?

The company raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $13.0 billion to $13.3 billion and its adjusted operating income guidance to $1.275 billion to $1.375 billion, a 26 percent increase at the midpoint from its prior guidance. It also raised its annualized run-rate revenue guidance to $20 billion to $21 billion to exit 2026.

What to watch next

The earnings call will set the tone for how investors judge the report, particularly any comments on financing and on whether customers are still signing contracts at the same pace. The company’s 10-Q filing, due with the earnings release, will give the first full update on its debt since June 30, when total debt stood at $35.1 billion. With the stock down by half in a month, the next test is whether the strong quarter is enough to change the conversation from CoreWeave’s balance sheet back to its growth.

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