CoreWeave Q1 2026 Earnings: Revenue Doubles, Soft Guidance Punishes Shares

CoreWeave (CRWV) posted Q1 2026 revenue of $2.08B, up 112% year-over-year, beating estimates, but Q2 guidance of $2.45–$2.6B fell short of the $2.69B Wall Street consensus, sending shares down 10% after hours.

Record Quarter Clouded by Cautious Near-Term Outlook

CoreWeave, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWV) delivered its strongest bookings quarter in company history when it reported first-quarter 2026 results on May 7, 2026, after market close. The Livingston, New Jersey-based AI cloud infrastructure provider posted $2.08 billion in revenue for the three months ended March 31, 2026 — a 112% increase year-over-year and a 32% sequential jump — surpassing Wall Street's consensus estimate of $1.97 billion. Despite the top-line beat, shares tumbled roughly 10% in extended trading, pressured by second-quarter revenue guidance that came in below analyst expectations and a material upward revision to full-year capital expenditures.

$99.4 Billion Backlog Signals Unprecedented AI Demand

The headline figure that defined the quarter was CoreWeave's contracted revenue backlog, which climbed to $99.4 billion as of March 31, 2026 — up approximately 50% from $66.8 billion at the end of December 2025 and nearly four times higher than the year-ago period. CEO and Co-founder Michael Intrator described the quarter as the "strongest bookings quarter in CoreWeave's history," with more than $40 billion in new customer commitments signed during Q1 alone.

Of the total backlog, 36% is expected to be recognized within the next 24 months, and 75% within four years, providing extended revenue visibility. Commitments from non-investment-grade AI-native customers and foundation labs were reduced to under 30% of total backlog, reflecting a deliberate diversification toward enterprise and financial services verticals.

Major customer wins during the quarter included Anthropic, contracted to support development and deployment of its Claude model family, and an expanded multi-year agreement with Meta valued at $21 billion through 2032. Financial services revenue backlog approached $10 billion, with Jane Street expanding its commitment by $6 billion in Q1 and Hudson River Trading joining as a new customer. Physical AI and spatial computing surpassed $1 billion in backlog contributions, adding World Labs, PhysicsX, and Sunday Robotics.

Revenue, Margins, and the Cost of Rapid Scaling

Q1 revenue of $2.08 billion was supported by CoreWeave surpassing 1 gigawatt of active power capacity — a milestone reached by only a handful of cloud operators historically. Total contracted power rose to more than 3.5 GW, up over 400 megawatts sequentially, with the substantial majority expected to come online by end of 2027.

On a GAAP basis, net loss widened to $740 million, compared to $315 million in Q1 2025, producing a net loss margin of 36%. Total operating expenses reached $2.22 billion, against revenue of $2.08 billion, resulting in a GAAP operating loss of $144 million. Interest expense, net, climbed to $536 million from $264 million a year earlier, reflecting the company's growing debt load used to finance infrastructure buildout.

Non-GAAP metrics told a more constructive story. Adjusted EBITDA rose to $1.157 billion, up from $606 million in Q1 2025, at a 56% margin. Adjusted operating income came in at $21 million, and CFO Nitin Agrawal characterized the 1% adjusted operating margin as the "low point" for 2026, attributing margin compression to the timing lag between powering up new facilities and generating revenue — typically a one-to-two month gap. Contribution margins normalize to the mid-20s by month three, management noted, with a return to low double-digit adjusted operating margins targeted by Q4 2026.

CapEx Surge and $8.5 Billion Financing Package

Capital expenditures totaled $6.8 billion in Q1 2026, surging 90% sequentially. Full-year 2026 CapEx guidance was raised to $31 billion to $35 billion, up from a prior low-end floor of $30 billion, with the revision driven by acute shortages in certain hardware components and the associated price inflation. CEO Intrator acknowledged on the earnings call that component costs have moved "up materially" over the last six to nine months, though he stated that supply contract structures provide the company "some insulation" from further volatility.

To fund the aggressive infrastructure expansion, CoreWeave executed a landmark $8.5 billion Delayed Draw Term Loan (DDTL 4.0) — described as the first investment-grade, non-recourse delayed draw term loan backed by high-performance computing infrastructure. The facility received an A-minus equivalent rating from Moody's, Fitch, and DBRS, was oversubscribed, and priced at an implied cost of under 6%. Additionally, CoreWeave raised $2 billion in equity linked to an expansion of its strategic relationship with NVIDIA. Management disclosed that more than $20 billion in total debt and equity capital was secured year-to-date, including over $10 billion of additional transactions entering Q2. S&P moved the company's corporate rating outlook from stable to positive, and the company reported no debt maturities until 2029 outside of self-amortizing contract-backed debt.

Q2 Guidance Misses, Full-Year Targets Held

For the second quarter of 2026, CoreWeave guided revenue to a range of $2.45 billion to $2.6 billion, meaningfully below the $2.69 billion analyst consensus estimate compiled by LSEG/Reuters. Adjusted operating income for Q2 is guided at $30 million to $90 million, and CapEx is expected in the range of $7 billion to $9 billion.

Full-year 2026 guidance was reaffirmed at $12 billion to $13 billion in revenue and $900 million to $1.1 billion in adjusted operating income. The company raised its annualized run-rate revenue exit target for year-end 2026 to $18 billion to $19 billion, up $1 billion at the low end. CoreWeave continues to target more than $30 billion in annualized run-rate revenue exiting 2027, with over 75% already contracted.

Market Reaction and the Path Ahead

CRWV shares fell approximately 10% in overnight trading following the print, with the stock trading around $128.84 in after-hours activity — on track for its worst single-day performance in about a month. The stock had entered the report with an approximately 80% gain year-to-date in 2026, following a 77% gain in 2025 since its Nasdaq debut in March of that year.

Retail sentiment on trading platforms turned "extremely bullish" in the immediate aftermath of the selloff, with a significant cohort of retail traders characterizing the guidance shortfall as a market overreaction given the scale of the company's contracted backlog and infrastructure buildout trajectory. Institutional focus, however, centered on the trajectory of interest expense, accelerating leverage, and the widening adjusted net loss — which reached $589 million for the quarter — as the company deploys capital at a pace that has few precedents in cloud infrastructure history.

Management highlighted that inference workloads now represent more than 50% of power utilization on CoreWeave's platform — a structural shift signaling that its hyperscale and enterprise customers are no longer just training models, but actively monetizing them through production deployment. With 1 GW of active power online, a path to 1.7 GW by year-end, and a contracted pipeline approaching $100 billion, the near-term margin and guidance disappointment did little to alter the company's long-range demand equation.

Mentioned tickers: CRWV, NVDA, META