OpenAI contracts and NVIDIA capital
CoreWeave signed an expanded agreement with OpenAI worth up to $6.5 billion. This brings the total value of the partnership with OpenAI to $22.4 billion. This agreement follows an $11.9 billion arrangement from March 2025 and a $4 billion expansion from May. These contracts support compute-intensive workloads such as model training and inference. In April, CoreWeave signed a $21 billion agreement with Meta to supply AI cloud capacity through 2032. The company also reached a multi-year agreement with Anthropic to support Claude AI models. NVIDIA invested $2 billion in CoreWeave to support the construction of 5 gigawatts of AI factories by 2030. These facilities will use NVIDIA hardware including Rubin GPUs, Vera CPUs, and Bluefield storage. NVIDIA will also test CoreWeave software, specifically SUNK and Mission Control, for inclusion in its own reference architectures. CoreWeave committed £1.5 billion to bolster AI innovation in the UK and launched CoreWeave Ventures to support AI startups. The company also acquired OpenPipe and Weights & Biases to expand its capabilities. Jane Street committed $7 billion to the company through a $6 billion cloud agreement and a $1 billion equity investment. This equity stake at $109 per share represented a 7% discount to the previous closing price. Jane Street now holds $1.44 billion in CoreWeave stock and ranks among the five largest shareholders.
Infrastructure growth and the competitive landscape
The revenue backlog for CoreWeave reached $66.8 billion. This figure grew fourfold during 2025. Customer contracts now average five years, which exceeds the previous four-year average. CoreWeave ended 2025 with more than 850 megawatts of active power across 43 data centers. The company contracted nearly two gigawatts of additional power in 2025, which brought total contracted capacity to more than 3.1 gigawatts. CoreWeave expects to add more than five gigawatts of additional data center capacity by 2030, following the contracting of nearly two gigawatts of additional power in 2025 to reach a total of 3.1 gigawatts. For 2026, the company expects to double active power capacity to more than 1.7 gigawatts. CoreWeave projects revenues between $12 billion and $13 billion for 2026. This implies 140% growth over the previous year. You already know the basics regarding AI compute demand, but the scale of these new commitments is significant. Microsoft remains a major partner, as the company accounted for 72% of CoreWeave revenue in the first quarter. Microsoft reported a commercial remaining performance obligation of $625 billion, which grew 110% year over year. A large portion of Microsoft’s RPO growth came from Azure commitments to OpenAI and Anthropic. Nebius is another competitor that expects to exceed 3 gigawatts of capacity by 2026. Nebius projects annualized run-rate revenue between $7 billion and $9 billion by the end of 2026. Nebius also reported a 50% increase in average contract duration for new cloud customers. Microsoft unveiled the Maia 200, an AI accelerator built on TSMC 3nm with 216GB HBM3e, which provides 10 petaFLOPS in FP4. FuriosaAI shipped 4,000 RNGD chips, which provide 512 INT8 TFLOPS at 180W TDP. This provides 3.5x greater compute density than H100 systems in standard air-cooled racks.
| Provider | 8-GPU H100 Node (30 days) | Egress Fees |
|---|---|---|
| Azure | $70,790 | $450 for 5 TB |
| CoreWeave | $35,453 | $0 |
| Lambda | $22,982 | $0 |
Capital intensity and debt risks
CoreWeave expects capital expenditures of $30 billion to $35 billion in 2026. This follows a projected $20 billion to $23 billion spend in 2025. The company reported an adjusted net loss of $150 million for the first quarter. Interest expenses rose 549% to $264 million in the first quarter. CoreWeave carries approximately $40.95 billion in outstanding debt. The company closed an $8.5 billion delayed draw term loan facility, which received an A3 rating from Moody’s. This facility includes a floating rate tranche at SOFR + 2.25% and a fixed rate tranche at approximately 5.9%. One analyst, Gil Luria from DA Davidson, downgraded the stock to Underperform because the level of capital intensity might exceed what investors can tolerate. He noted that the company borrows at high interest rates to buy products that lose economic value quickly. CoreWeave uses its debt, borrowed against its store of NVIDIA GPUs, to buy more NVIDIA chips. Bloomberg reported that CoreWeave is looking to raise $1.5 billion in a debt deal. The company faces $8.1 billion in debt maturities due within a year, while it holds $6.4 billion in cash. A market analysis suggested a 58% chance of default within five years based on credit default swap spreads. CoreWeave shares lost 22.7% over the past month. The company has secured approximately $28 billion in financing over the past 12 months. Will the company maintain its growth as interest obligations continue to grow?
