CoreWeave tumbles on higher than expected capex and plans to keep accelerating its investments
CoreWeave framed this higher capex as a positive, Wall Street and the market don’t seem to agree.
CoreWeave is tumbling on Friday morning after suffering a big bottom-line miss along with much higher-than-anticipated capital expenditures after the close on Thursday.
For Q4, the neocloud reported:
Revenues of $1.57 billion (estimate: $1.55 billion).
Adjusted EBITDA of $898 million (estimate: $936 million).
Adjusted capex of $8.2 billion (estimate: $6 billion).
CoreWeave framed higher than expected capex as a positive.
“The pace of our execution also explains why our capital expenditures for Q4 came in above guidance,” said CEO Michael Intrator on the conference call. “Our teams were able to bring infrastructure into service ahead of our expectations, which we view as a high-quality acceleration of revenue capacity for 2026.”
The market, and Wall Street, don’t seem to agree.
“We remain Hold-rated as we expect CoreWeave to continue prioritizing CapEx spend, cutting into profitability, and muddying the evaluation of underlying unit economics,” wrote Needham analyst Mike Cikos in the aftermath of these results.
The neocloud said capex would be “at least $30 billion” this year, while analysts had anticipated $27.2 billion.
However, revenue guidance for $12 to $13 billion more modestly exceeded the Street’s call for $12.26 billion.
“This suggests greater-than-expected investment could be necessary to ultimately recognize revenue, which may force long-run profit assumptions lower,” wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard.
