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Pathikrit Bose

Coreweave Rallies on Upbeat Q2 Results. How to Trade CRWV Stock Here.

AI infrastructure companies have been having a ball this week. It started with a bang after bellwether Nvidia (NVDA) essentially turned its GPUs into an asset class with a $500 billion war chest and some of the leading asset managers of the world, including BlackRock (BLK), Blackstone (BLX), and KKR (KKR). Joining the party with Super Micro Computer (SMCI) and the neocloud company Nebius (NBIS) is the latter's competitor, CoreWeave (CRWV). The Mike Intrator-led necloud company's shares were down about 30% from its last earnings report. However, with the latest Q2 2026 numbers, CRWV stock rallied by 19.3% in yesterday's trading session.

About CoreWeave

Founded in 2017 as a cryptocurrency mining business, CoreWeave occupies the vaunted position of being one of the foremost AI infrastructure companies in the world. Now, CoreWeave provides enormous amounts of specialized computing power to companies developing and running AI. It operates data centers containing large clusters of Nvidia GPUs, with the overall objective of making thousands of GPUs behave like a single high-performance computing system. It is also concentrating on building a software stack, with its capabilities launching in 2026 to connect training, inference, observability, reinforcement learning, and autonomous agent improvement.

Valued at a market cap of $40.4 billion, CRWV stock is up 50% on a year-to-date (YTD) basis.

And from what was witnessed yesterday, the second-quarter results may only extend this upmove. However, will it be just smooth sailing, or does the Q2 print have some obvious shortcomings? Let's find out.

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Revenue Doubles, Yet Losses Remain an Eyesore

In Q2 2026, CoreWeave's revenue stood at $2.6 billion. Not only did this mark a YoY growth of 116.7%, but it was also a beat on the Street's estimate. However, as one goes down the income statement, the picture gets a bit murkier despite all the optimism around backlog, capex, and revenue guidance.

Operating income margins slid to 5% from 16% in the year-ago period, while the company reported a net loss per share of $1.14 per share. Although this was lower than the consensus estimate of a loss of $1.47 per share, it almost doubled from the previous year's figure of a loss of $0.60 per share. Notably, this was the third consecutive quarter of losses widening for the company.

For Q3, CoreWeave expects revenue to be between $3.45 and $3.60 billion, the midpoint of which would denote another impressive growth rate of 159.2% from the prior year. Meanwhile, analysts are expecting the same to be $3.54 billion. Notably, an increase in capex guidance also did not put a dent in the share price, as it was increased for the full year. The company now expects capex to be in the range of $35 and $39 billion, up from $31 and $35 billion earlier.

In terms of backlog, the metric was at $104 billion as of June 30, 2026. This denoted an almost 3.5x growth from the year-ago period, with the company revealing (almost flexing) that this did not include another $25 billion in new customer commitments. Moreover, management noted that newly signed customer agreements in the quarter delivered terms that were five to ten percentage points more favorable than those secured in the prior period. When paired with the ongoing production ramp, this improvement is generating meaningful operating leverage.

Positive signs emerged on the cash flow front as well, with net cash from operating activities for the quarter coming in at $679 million, compared with an outflow of $251 million in the prior year. Overall, CoreWeave ended the June 2026 quarter with a cash balance of $5.5 billion. However, this was less than the company’s short-term debt levels of about $8.1 billion.

Further, CoreWeave now expects to end the calendar year with an active power capacity of 1.85 GW, up from 1.70 GW projected earlier, as CEO Intrator revealed that CoreWeave "remain firmly on track to reach at least 8 gigawatts by 2030." When compared to the previous year, the active power capacity is up by 219.15%, while contracted power and data centers at 3.7 GW and 51 represent jumps of 68.2% and 54.5%, respectively.

Inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 Index ($IUXX) will come as a boost for the company's stock, with major passive flows expected following the inclusion.

Finally, coming to valuation, CRWV stock trades at reasonable levels. Its forward P/S and P/CF are at 3.90 and 5.65, compared to the sector medians of 3.42 and 20.65, respectively, with forward earnings metrics not applicable due to its lack of profitability.

Analyst Opinion of CRWV Stock

Overall, analysts remain cautiously optimistic about CoreWeave and have assigned a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” for CRWV stock, with a mean target price of $139.85. This denotes a potential upside of about 30% from current levels. Out of 36 analysts covering the stock, 22 have a “Strong Buy” rating, one has a “Medium Buy” rating, 12 have a “Hold” rating, and one has a “Strong Sell” rating.

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