Why CoreWeave announcing the date of its Q2 earnings actually matters

CoreWeave, the recently IPO’d provider of access to Nvidia’s GPUs, announced on Wednesday that it will be releasing earnings on August 12 after the market closes.

Normally, we would not write about companies telling us when they’re publishing quarterly results. But this situation is not normal.

As previously detailed, CoreWeave’s prospectus indicates that the lockup period for 84% of its shares expires on “the close of trading on the second trading day after the date that we publicly announce earnings for the second quarter.”

Now, it’s not like CoreWeave’s major holders are going to be eagerly waiting for the close of trading on August 14 with both hands hovering over the sell button, ready to flood the market. But it is highly likely that the float going up will make the cost of borrowing CoreWeave go down, since there’s going to be more shares available to sell short.

That’s certainly something that matters to people who either a) want to bet against the high-flying AI darling and, perhaps more importantly, b) those who want to bet on a successful CoreWeave-Core Scientific merger.

The cost to short CoreWeave and buy Core Scientific to profit from the big spread between where the latter was trading versus the former was prohibitively high.

And lo and behold, after CoreWeave tells the world when its Q2 earnings will drop, we’re seeing a session where shares of Core Scientific manage to rise while shares of the acquiring company fall.