CoreWeave, Inc. Class A ((CRWV)) has held its Q4 earnings call. Read on for the main highlights of the call.
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Trade CRWV with leverageCoreWeave, Inc. Class A’s latest earnings call struck a distinctly bullish tone, as management spotlighted explosive revenue growth, a massive long-term backlog, and deepening ties with key partners in the AI ecosystem. While executives acknowledged mounting GAAP losses, heavy CapEx, and rising interest costs, they framed these as deliberate, contract-backed bets to capture extraordinary demand in accelerated computing and AI infrastructure.
Record Revenue Growth
CoreWeave delivered full-year 2025 revenue of $5.1 billion, a 168% jump from the prior year that underscores how fast AI infrastructure demand is scaling. Fourth-quarter revenue reached $1.6 billion, up 110% year-over-year, showing that growth momentum not only held but intensified into year-end despite a much larger base.
Massive Contracted Backlog
The company’s revenue backlog swelled to $66.8 billion, growing more than $11.2 billion sequentially and more than $50 billion year-over-year as AI and enterprise customers locked in future capacity. Management emphasized that backlog expanded more than fourfold during 2025, providing unusually strong multi-year visibility and supporting the case for its aggressive buildout.
Rapid Capacity Expansion
CoreWeave exited 2025 with more than 850 megawatts of active power and 43 operating data centers, up from 32 at the start of the year as the footprint scaled rapidly. The company added roughly 260 megawatts in Q4 alone and contracted nearly 2 gigawatts of additional power in 2025, ending the year with over 3.1 gigawatts under contract to support future demand.
Strong Adjusted EBITDA and Margin
Profitability on an adjusted basis remained impressive despite the heavy buildout, with Q4 adjusted EBITDA reaching $898 million, nearly double the prior-year period. That translated to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 57%, signaling strong unit economics in the core cloud and AI infrastructure business even as the company spends aggressively on capacity.
Customer Diversification and Enterprise Adoption
The customer base is broadening quickly, with the number of clients committed to spending at least $1 million on CoreWeave Cloud rising nearly 150% year-over-year. In Q4, the company added roughly twice as many new reserved instance customers as in any previous quarter, highlighting new names such as Cognition, Cursor, Mercado Libre, Midjourney, and Runway.
Platform Monetization Progress and Attach Rates
Monetization of the broader platform is gaining traction as customers increasingly adopt adjacent services alongside compute. Around 80% of CoreWeave Cloud customers spending $1 million or more now use at least one storage product, and cross-selling efforts with Weights & Biases drove hundreds of millions of total contract value in the second half of the year.
Strategic Partnerships and Industry Recognition
Management underscored the strategic value of its expanded relationship with NVIDIA, which includes a recently announced multi-billion-dollar investment that further aligns the companies on AI infrastructure. CoreWeave also achieved NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud Status for GB200 and was singled out by SemiAnalysis as the sole platinum-ranked AI cloud, strengthening its positioning with sophisticated AI workloads.
Liquidity and Capital Markets Access
To fund its aggressive build plan, CoreWeave tapped capital markets extensively, raising more than $18 billion in debt and equity during 2025, including sizable convertible notes and an expanded revolving credit facility. The company finished the year with $4.2 billion in cash, restricted cash, and marketable securities, which management views as a strategic buffer while it ramps its data center portfolio.
GAAP Losses and Elevated Interest Expense
The downside of the buildout is becoming visible in reported earnings, as Q4 net loss ballooned to $452 million compared with a $51 million loss a year earlier. Interest expense surged to $388 million in the quarter from $149 million in the prior-year period, reflecting the higher debt load taken on to finance the rapidly expanding infrastructure.
Adjusted Net Loss and Operating Income Compression
Even on an adjusted basis, profitability compressed as new capacity came online ahead of full revenue ramp, with Q4 adjusted net loss widening to $284 million from $36 million a year ago. Adjusted operating income fell to $88 million from $121 million, and the adjusted operating margin slipped to 6%, which management attributed to deploying infrastructure faster than originally planned.
Very Large and Accelerating CapEx Burden
Capital intensity has become a defining feature of CoreWeave’s growth story, with Q4 CapEx reaching $8.2 billion and full-year 2025 CapEx totaling $14.9 billion, both above expectations. Looking ahead, the company plans to more than double that pace in 2026, signaling that investors must brace for a prolonged period of heavy spending and financing needs.
Near-Term Margin Pressure from Deployment Timing
Management cautioned that margins will remain under pressure near term because lease, power, and depreciation expenses start as soon as capacity goes live, while customer workloads take time to fill the systems. They flagged Q1 2026 as the trough for margins, with adjusted operating income guided to a narrow $0–$40 million range before a gradual recovery later in the year.
High Construction in Progress and Working Capital Intensity
Construction in progress rose to $9.4 billion, up $2.5 billion quarter-over-quarter, highlighting the sheer volume of assets being built but not yet generating revenue. This pipeline of projects increases near-term working capital demands and cash burn, but management argues it sets up a wave of future capacity that will support backlog monetization.
Heavy Interest Burden Expected in Early 2026
The company expects interest expense to climb further in early 2026, with Q1 guidance of $510–$590 million underscoring the cost of debt-funded expansion. Even with a roughly 300-basis-point improvement in the weighted average interest rate during 2025, the absolute size of the balance sheet ensures interest will remain a material drag on near-term GAAP earnings.
Short-Term GAAP Profitability Risk
Executives were blunt that the current investment cadence and mismatch between CapEx, depreciation, and revenue timing make continued GAAP losses likely. They also flagged that quarterly results could be volatile as large data centers move from construction to service, but argued that the long-duration contracted backlog should ultimately translate into more stable profitability.
Guidance and Forward-Looking Outlook
For 2026, CoreWeave is guiding to revenue of $12–$13 billion, roughly 140% year-over-year growth at the midpoint, supported by its $66.8 billion backlog and more than 3.1 gigawatts of contracted capacity. Management expects active power to double to over 1.7 gigawatts, adjusted operating income of $900 million–$1.1 billion, and margins that bottom in Q1 then rise to low double digits by Q4, with a long-term margin target in the mid-20s.
CoreWeave’s earnings call painted a picture of a company racing to meet colossal AI demand, balancing stellar growth metrics against equally outsized investment and financing needs. For investors, the story is one of high risk and high potential reward, where execution on capacity ramp, backlog monetization, and capital structure will determine whether today’s heavy losses evolve into tomorrow’s durable, high-margin cash flows.