CoreWeave Shares Drop on Light Quarterly Guidance
CoreWeave Inc., a specialist in artificial intelligence-focused cloud infrastructure, saw its shares decline 8% in extended trading on Thursday, February 27, 2026. The sell-off followed the company’s report of fourth-quarter results that, while slightly beating on revenue, delivered a wider-than-expected adjusted loss and provided first-quarter guidance that fell short of analyst consensus.
CEO Mike Intrator, speaking from the New York Stock Exchange floor in an interview with CNBC, framed the short-term margin pressure as a deliberate strategy to accelerate capacity build-out in response to overwhelming client demand.
Q4 Results: Revenue Beats, EPS Misses
For the quarter ended December 31, 2025, CoreWeave reported revenue of $1.57 billion, a 110% year-over-year increase, edging past the $1.55 billion consensus estimate from LSEG (formerly Refinitiv). However, adjusted earnings per share showed a loss of 56 cents, worse than the anticipated loss of 49 cents. Adjusted EBITDA, a key metric for infrastructure companies, was $898 million, also below the $929 million StreetAccount consensus.
First-Quarter and Full-Year 2026 Guidance Falls Short
The primary catalyst for the post-market decline was CoreWeave’s forecast for the current quarter. The company guided for first-quarter revenue in the range of $$1.9 billion to $2 billion. This was significantly below the $2.29 billion average analyst estimate compiled by LSEG.
For the full year 2026, CoreWeave projected revenue of $12 billion to $13 billion. While the midpoint of this range ($12.5 billion) was above the $12.09 billion LSEG consensus, the lower end of the guidance likely gave investors pause. The company is also targeting massive capital expenditures of $30 billion to $35 billion for 2026, up sharply from $10.31 billion in 2025, and aims to end the year with over 1.7 gigawatts of active power capacity, above Visible Alpha’s consensus of 1.59 GW.
CEO Intrator Addresses Supply Constraints and Capacity Expansion
On the analyst call and with CNBC, Intrator directly addressed the persistent bottleneck in the AI hardware supply chain. He noted that average prices for Nvidia’s flagship H100 processors in Q4 remained within 10% of their levels at the start of 2025, while prices for the older A100 actually increased. “Nvidia graphics chips, which lie at the core of CoreWeave’s offering, remain in short supply,” Intrator stated.
He credited internal and external efforts for resolving previously announced construction delays. “We brought in data center technicians from across our entire portfolio… and third-party vendors also helped,” he told CNBC, emphasizing a focus on building “at maximum speed.”
Intrator defended the aggressive spending plan, linking it directly to contractual demand. “We made the decision intentionally to go ahead and build more faster, and that is being driven by the fact that our clients are desperate to get access to more infrastructure faster,” he said, adding that the company is willing to accept a short-term margin hit to secure long-term market position.
Backlog Growth and Strategic Shifts in AI Demand
A key positive signal was the swelling customer backlog, which grew to $66.8 billion from $55.6 billion at the end of Q3. Furthermore, the weighted average length of customer contracts has increased to five years from four at the end of 2024, suggesting deepening, stickier relationships.
Intrator highlighted an evolution in the AI demand landscape. “Not only are we seeing the proliferation of demand across the economy going from where was initially really housed within the hyperscaler clouds and the foundation models… You’re now seeing it kind of explode into the enterprise. You’re seeing it move into sovereign. You’re seeing all these new participants beginning to come in and securing the infrastructure that they need.”
Operationally, CoreWeave reported 850 megawatts in active power capacity at year-end, slightly above the ~827 MW analyst projection. Contracted power stood at a substantial 3.1 gigawatts.
Market Context: AI Software Concerns vs. CoreWeave’s Outperformance
CoreWeave’s stock had risen approximately 36% in 2026 prior to the earnings announcement, a stark contrast to the nearly 22% decline in the broader iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF during the same period. This outperformance occurred even as investor sentiment toward pure-play AI software companies, like Anthropic, has grown more cautious recently.
CoreWeave’s business model, supplying critical GPU-accelerated infrastructure to leading AI model builders like Google and OpenAI, positions it as an enabler of the AI stack rather than a direct application competitor.
Competitive Moves and Financial Position
The company is slowly broadening its offerings to compete more directly with hyperscalers like
