Analysis
CoreWeave reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of $3.66 billion on November 10, up 168% from about $1.36 billion a year earlier and ahead of the $3.55 billion analysts expected, CNBC reported.
The AI cloud provider's revenue backlog reached approximately $132.5 billion as of September 30, up from $104 billion at the end of June, and it raised its full-year revenue outlook, per the company's earnings release.
The beat landed on a stock that had lost about 40% of its value in the past month during a wider slide in AI infrastructure shares and rising interest rates, per CNBC. Shares advanced in extended trading. CEO Michael Intrator called it "a breakout quarter for CoreWeave, with revenue increasing by more than $1 billion sequentially."
“The beat landed on a stock that had lost about 40% of its value in the past month during a wider slide in AI infrastructure shares and rising interest rates, per CNBC.”
CoreWeave Q3 2026 earnings by the numbers
From the release, comparing the quarter with the third quarter of 2025:
- Revenue -- $3,661 million, from $1,365 million
- Operating income -- $207 million, from $52 million
- Net loss -- $709 million, or $1.27 a share, from $110 million
- Adjusted EBITDA -- $2,256 million, a 62% margin
- Adjusted operating income -- $379 million, a 10% margin, down from 16%
The adjusted loss was 95 cents a share against the $1.16 analysts expected, per CNBC.
CoreWeave now guides to $13.0 billion-$13.3 billion of 2026 revenue, which CNBC describes as a raise from its August guidance, and $1.275 billion-$1.375 billion of adjusted operating income, and to an exit-2026 annualized revenue run rate of $20 billion-$21 billion.
What CoreWeave does
CoreWeave rents Nvidia GPU capacity to AI labs and enterprises from its own data centers. It started in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto and is based in Livingston, New Jersey, per Wikipedia. Active power rose by more than 200 megawatts in the quarter to over 1.7 gigawatts, and contracted power grew by more than 900 megawatts to over 4.6 gigawatts, per the release. New customers include Canva, Substack, Wayve and Serve Robotics, and expanded relationships include OpenAI, Cohere, Perplexity and Jane Street. CNBC names Anthropic as a key customer.
Value Add VC data
CoreWeave's private and public financing history, as verified this run:
- May 2024, equity round -- $1.1B at a reported $19B, led by Coatue Management (Wikipedia)
- Mar 2025, Nasdaq IPO (CRWV) -- raised $1.5B (Wikipedia)
- Jan 2026, strategic investment -- $2B from Nvidia at $87.20 a share (Wikipedia)
Pulse has tracked CoreWeave's financing on its company page, including the 15% bond yield debate over AI infrastructure debt.
The debt behind the backlog
The backlog is the bull case, and the balance sheet is the bear case. CoreWeave owed almost $47 billion in debt at the end of the third quarter, per CNBC, and guides to $1.05 billion-$1.15 billion of interest expense in the fourth quarter alone, per the release.
Full-year capital spending is now guided at $37 billion-$39 billion, up from a $35 billion-$39 billion range. Separately, CFO Nitin Agrawal projects under $5 billion of parent-level debt financing through 2027, per CNBC. The adjusted operating margin falling to 10% from 16% shows that growth is costing more to deliver, even as EBITDA margin holds near 62%.
Neocloud market and competitors
Synergy Research Group forecasts neocloud revenue reaching almost $180 billion in 2030, growing an average 69% a year, and says CoreWeave leads the group as a direct competitor to hyperscale clouds, per SRG Research.
CoreWeave's customer list overlaps with the labs going public or raising at trillion-dollar marks: Anthropic, which set its IPO range this week, and OpenAI, whose third-quarter revenue of about $10 billion came with a $10.9 billion adjusted operating loss, per reporting covered in Pulse's OpenAI revenue story.
A $132.5 billion backlog is only as strong as those customers' ability to keep paying, and the fourth-quarter interest bill of more than $1 billion arrives regardless.
