By Juby Babu
May 7 (Reuters) – CoreWeave Inc raised the lower end of its annual capital expenditure forecast on Thursday, citing a rise in the prices of components, sending the cloud infrastructure technology company’s shares down more than 9% in extended trading.
Demand for services from the so-called neoclouds, such as CoreWeave and Nebius, has skyrocketed as tech companies seek the hardware and cloud capacity needed for AI technologies.
CoreWeave lifted the lower end of its 2026 capital expenditure to $31 billion from $30 billion while keeping the upper range unchanged at $35 billion.
“We are on a fantastic ramp through the balance of this year into 2027 – the why the market takes me up or down on any given day is sort of what the market does,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator told Reuters in an interview. “It’s not what I’m doing, right? What I’m doing is I’m building a company.”
Customers are committing to long-term data center investments as technology companies race toward artificial general intelligence, pushing up demand for advanced memory and storage and creating a supply crunch that is driving up prices.
Just in the last month, CoreWeave, known for its close relationship with AI chip bellwether Nvidia, struck an expanded $21 billion deal for additional cloud computing capacity with Meta, a $6 billion deal with trading firm Jane Street and a third one with Anthropic.
CoreWeave added more than 400 megawatts of contracted power in the first quarter, bringing its total contracted power to more than 3.5 gigawatts, Intrator said on a post-earnings call with analysts.
The company reported total revenue of $2.08 billion for the first quarter, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $1.97 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Its operating expenses more than doubled to $2.22 billion in the quarter, a result of continuing to scale active power capacity, finance chief Nitin Agrawal said on the call.
Andrew Rocco, stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research, compared CoreWeave’s strategy to Amazon’s early days as an e-commerce pioneer, noting that the company is sacrificing short-term profitability in an attempt to dominate the market.
“If investors are willing to stay the course, CoreWeave positions itself to be a dominant player in the AI infrastructure industry,” Rocco added.
For the second quarter, CoreWeave expects revenue in the range of $2.45 billion to $2.6 billion, below analysts’ estimate of $2.69 billion.
The company had a revenue backlog of $99.4 billion as of March 31, compared with $66.8 billion at the end of December.
“I think we did everything that we needed to do to have a great quarter, and I think that is going to lead us into a great back half of the year,” Intrator said.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City and Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Stephen Coates)
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