CoreWeave Revenue Climbs 168% to $3.66B, and Its Stock Jumps 25%

CoreWeave added more than $1 billion of revenue in three months, and on Wednesday the market noticed. The AI cloud reported third-quarter revenue of $3.661 billion, up 168% from a year earlier, raised its full-year forecast and said customers will hand it about $9 billion in prepayments and deposits over the next three months. Its shares closed up 24.7% at $60.77 on November 11, after a month in which the stock had lost about 40% as investors cooled on AI infrastructure.

A Billion Dollars of New Revenue in One Quarter

For the quarter that ended September 30, CoreWeave's revenue rose to $3.661 billion from $1.365 billion a year earlier. Michael Intrator, its co-founder and chief executive, called it “a breakout quarter,” with revenue up more than $1 billion from the previous three months and adjusted operating margins reaching double digits a quarter ahead of plan.

At the top of this year's revenue forecast, that backlog equals roughly ten years of sales already under contract. Management raised that forecast to $13.0 billion to $13.3 billion, from $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion in August, lifted adjusted operating income guidance by 26% at the midpoint to $1.275 billion to $1.375 billion, and now expects to exit 2026 at an annualized run rate of $20 billion to $21 billion.

The company still loses money as it builds. Its net loss was $709 million, against $110 million a year earlier, and it expects $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion of interest expense in the fourth quarter alone. That is why the most closely read part of the report was not the revenue line. It was how CoreWeave plans to pay for what comes next.

The $9 Billion Customers Pay Up Front

Rising interest rates have made money expensive for the neoclouds, the specialists that rent out Nvidia GPUs. CNBC reported that some CoreWeave bonds recently yielded more than 16%, and the company owed almost $47 billion at the end of the quarter.

CoreWeave's answer is to lean on the people who need its computers. It expects about $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits over the next three months, and Intrator told analysts that most of the capital it needs for 2027 will come from those prepayments and from financing by hardware partners. It closed a $2.6 billion loan facility designed for shorter customer contracts, and raised about $4.2 billion in convertible notes during the quarter.

“At current yields, we do not intend to issue additional parent-level unsecured debt through 2027.”— Nitin Agrawal, CoreWeave CFO

Agrawal said loans secured by specific assets still trade around face value, and he projects less than $5 billion of parent-level debt financing through 2027. Put plainly, the customers waiting for chips are now funding a large share of the data centers that will hold them. Which raises the question of how much there is left to build.

1.7 Gigawatts Online, 4.6 Under Contract

CoreWeave added more than 200 megawatts of active power in the quarter to reach over 1.7 gigawatts, doubling its active footprint since the start of the year, and expects more than 1.85 gigawatts by year-end. Contracted power grew by more than 900 megawatts to over 4.6 gigawatts, including more than 1.3 gigawatts abroad in places like India, Indonesia and Spain. Full-year capital spending is now expected at $37 billion to $39 billion.

The newest racks are already earning. CoreWeave brought multi-rack Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems online, and the first production workloads, for the coding startup Cognition, ran with 4.8 times the token throughput of the previous GB200 generation. Canva, Substack and the self-driving company Wayve joined as customers, while OpenAI, Perplexity and Jane Street expanded their deals.

The rebound has room to run before it repairs everything. Even after Wednesday's close, the stock sits 56% below its 52-week high of $138.25, and Anthropic, a key customer, is due to list on Nasdaq next week. “We see that we're going to have long-term relationships with the AI labs,” Intrator said.

The AI build-out now has a new kind of lender: the customers who cannot wait for it.