Despite the cash surge, shares dipped more than five per cent in after-hours trading after the firm admitted that a third-party data centre developer was holding things up. As a result, capital expenditures and revenue tied to that customer will be deferred into future quarters.
The outfit, which floated in March, posted a net loss of $110 million, or 22 cents a share. That was a sight better than the $359 million, or $1.82 per share, it managed to burn through in the same quarter last year.
Sales rocketed to $1.36 billion from $583 million a year ago, and the revenue backlog, meaning future loot from recurring punters, jumped to $55.6 billion by the end of September. Analysts had expected it to land somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion.
CoreWeave blamed the chaos on “unprecedented demand for AI.” During the quarter, it inked a slew of new or expanded deals, including a $14.2 billion whopper with Meta Platforms, another $6.5 billion agreement with OpenAI, and a fresh mystery contract with a “leading hyperscaler” that the firm refused to name. That brings the company’s tally of major deals to six.
The company’s bread and butter involves leasing data centres packed with racks of servers loaded with Nvidia AI chips, then renting out those compute systems to AI developers and users. Nvidia owns about seven per cent of CoreWeave’s shares.
CoreWeave has carved out a reputation as one of the most cutthroat players in the AI infrastructure game, a market currently ballooning into what some are calling one of the most significant tech build-outs in history. The outfit has made headlines for borrowing eye-watering sums of private equity cash, secured against Nvidia hardware, to bankroll its data centre binge.
CoreWeave chief executive Michael Intrator shrugged off worries about a looming data centre bubble, saying “AI will help the economy expand quickly enough to cover the costs of the investment pouring into it.”
Still, shares of other big tech names also took a tumble last week as the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street panicked about whether the trillions of dollars being ploughed into AI infrastructure might deliver sweet bugger all for shareholders.