CoreWeave (CRWV) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Date: November 10, 2025 | Source: CoreWeave Investor Relations / FactSet CallStreet (corrected transcript)

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Operator: Thank you for standing by. My name is Tina and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CoreWeave Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you.

CoreWeave IR (Unverified Participant): Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q to be filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to CoreWeave's third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mike Intrator, CEO; and Nitin Agrawal, CFO.

Michael Intrator (Co-Founder, Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. CoreWeave once again delivered an exceptional quarter showcasing the accelerating momentum underlying our business as AI adoption proliferates globally across industries. We continue to operate in a highly supply-constrained environment where the demand for CoreWeave's best-in-class AI cloud platform far exceeds available capacity. This insatiable customer demand is a clear signal that the world's leading companies trust CoreWeave to power their most critical AI workloads.

In Q3, we beat expectations, delivering revenue of $1.4 billion, up 134% year-over-year. We added over $25 billion in revenue backlog in the third quarter alone, bringing us to over $55 billion in revenue backlog to end Q3, almost double Q2 and approaching 4 times year to date. Further, CoreWeave has reached $50 billion in RPO faster than any cloud in history. These results demonstrate the deep confidence customers have in CoreWeave, the company they trust as their essential cloud for artificial intelligence.

In Q3, we executed large-scale compute contracts with many of our largest customers, including Meta and OpenAI. Each represents a meaningful expansion of existing relationships and a diversification away from any single customer. Our exceptional growth illustrates just how quickly AI adoption is progressing beyond the frontier AI labs and hyperscalers. Broader global demand and our recent large wins are driving diversification of our revenue base. For example, the number of customers that exceeded $100 million of revenue over the last 12 months tripled year-over-year.

At the forefront of foundation model development, poolside selected CoreWeave to power its mission to build artificial general intelligence and enable the deployment of agents across enterprises, while Periodic Labs is using CoreWeave to push the boundaries of scientific discovery and computational research. At the application layer, we added AI-native customers like Jasper. We are also seeing incredible momentum within enterprises. CrowdStrike chose CoreWeave to advance the development of AI agents for cybersecurity, while Rakuten is using our platform to transform their visual language models.

Our reach now extends into the public sector. We recently launched CoreWeave Federal to bring our cloud services to the US government agencies and the defense industrial base. Already, NASA is leveraging our services to advance scientific exploration at its Jet Propulsion Lab. These recent wins underscore that we are enterprise-ready. With our customer base broadening across verticals and geographies, we are excited to welcome Jon Jones as our first Chief Revenue Officer. Jon joins us from AWS, where he served as Global Head of Startups and Venture Capital.

Next, as I move to discuss our growing data center footprint, I want to briefly touch on our previously proposed acquisition of Core Scientific, which was terminated in October. While the deal made sense strategically for both companies, the valuation required by their shareholders was simply not a price that was appropriate for CoreWeave, particularly because the outcome of the transaction in no way adversely impacts our ability to achieve our growth ambitions in the coming years. Instead, we will continue to work closely with Core Scientific on the approximately 590 megawatts of capacity we have already leased.

Our disciplined approach to expanding our capacity footprint ensures we are meeting the surging global demand for CoreWeave's Cloud Services. As I mentioned, we grew our contracted power capacity to 2.9 gigawatts this quarter as we diversified across size, geography, and developers enhancing resilience and flexibility across our portfolio. As of Q3, no single data center provider represents more than approximately 20% of our contracted power portfolio.

While we are experiencing relentless demand for our platform, data center developers across the industry are also enduring unprecedented pressure across supply chains. In our case, we are affected by temporary delays related to a third-party data center developer who is behind schedule. This impacts fourth quarter expectations, which Nitin will discuss shortly.

In the third quarter, we continued to deliver many of the initial scaled deployments of the GB200s, while once again being first to market, this time with the GB300s, further highlighting our incredible track record of operational excellence. CoreWeave's industry leadership is unmatched. We are the only cloud provider to submit MLPerf inference results for GB300s, setting the benchmark for real-world AI performance. And just last week, SemiAnalysis once again recognized our dominance, awarding CoreWeave its highest possible distinction, its Platinum ClusterMAX ranking, for the second time ahead of more than 200 providers.

Demand for AI cloud technology remains robust across generations of GPUs. For example, in Q3, we saw our first 10,000-plus H100 contract approaching expiration. Two quarters in advance, the customer proactively re-contracted for the infrastructure at a price within 5% of the original agreement.

CoreWeave's AI Object Storage delivers the highest amount of throughput of AI workloads, while cutting the customer's cost by more than 75%. We have already seen tremendous interest in this offering, adding a number of initial customers, including frontier AI labs like Mistral. With OpenPipe, we introduced the first publicly available serverless reinforcement learning tool. With Marimo, we are expanding CoreWeave's exposure to and impact within the open-source community. Across our entire storage platform, we have seen rapid customer adoption eclipsing $100 million in ARR in Q3.

With Monolith, we are expanding these capabilities into the physical world to unlock the monetization of AI today, initially focusing on industrial use cases with an established enterprise customer base and mature workloads, including leading auto OEMs like Nissan and Stellantis. Our new storage product and partnership with VAST Data is another example of accelerating both our product portfolio and partner go-to-market motions, and allows us to compete in new markets where we previously had limited or no offerings. Our momentum has never been stronger and the opportunities ahead continue to expand. The future runs on CoreWeave and we are just getting started.

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): With that, here's Nitin. Now turning to Q3 results, Q3 revenue was $1.4 billion, up 134% year-over-year, driven by robust customer demand and strong execution. Revenue backlog for the quarter ended at $55.6 billion, almost doubling in the third quarter alone. Demand remains robust for not just the Blackwell platform, but across our GPU portfolio. In the third quarter, we signed a number of deals for older generations of GPUs, adding new customers and recontracting existing capacity.

The breadth of demand for CoreWeave's cloud services has enabled us to reduce our customer concentration significantly. Today, no single customer represents more than approximately 35% of our revenue backlog, down from approximately 50% last quarter and even more meaningfully from approximately 85% to begin the year. Additionally, as of Q3, more than 60% of our revenue backlog is tied to investment-grade customers.

Operating expenses in the third quarter were $1.3 billion, including stock-based compensation expense of $144 million. Adjusted operating income for Q3 was $217 million compared to $125 million in Q3 of 2024. Our Q3 adjusted operating margin was 16%. Adjusted operating income was better than expected due to higher revenue, lower costs due to timing of data center deliveries from our third-party partners, and improved fleet efficiencies.

Net loss for the third quarter was $110 million compared to a $360 million net loss in Q3 of 2024. Interest expense for Q3 was $311 million compared to $104 million in Q3 of 2024 due to increased debt to support the scaling of our infrastructure, partly offset by the benefit from better interest rates on our debt. Adjusted net loss for Q3 was $41 million compared to approximately breakeven in Q3 of 2024, while adjusted EBITDA for Q3 was $838 million compared to $379 million in Q3 of 2024, increasing more than 2x year-over-year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 61%.

Turning to capital expenditures, CapEx in Q3 totaled $1.9 billion, lower than anticipated due to the delays Mike mentioned related to deliveries from a third-party data center provider. The meaningful growth in construction in progress to $6.9 billion, an increase of $2.8 billion quarter-over-quarter, is a direct result. We raised $1.75 billion in senior notes in July, extending our exposure to the high yield market at a cost 25 basis points lower than our inaugural offering in May. Year to date, CoreWeave has successfully secured $14 billion in debt and equity transactions. Other than payments related to OEM vendor financing and self-amortizing debt through committed contract payments, we have no debt maturities until 2028.

Now turning to guidance, as mentioned, the delays in powered shell delivery associated with the data center provider will have an impact on our fourth quarter results. These delays are temporary, and the affected customer has agreed to adjust the delivery schedule to preserve their capacity for the full duration and the total value of the original agreement. With that backdrop, we now expect 2025 revenue in the range of $5.05 billion to $5.15 billion. In addition, we anticipate 2025 adjusted operating income between $690 million to $720 million and expect to end the year with over 850 megawatts of active power.

In Q4, we will be bringing online some of the largest-scale deployments in our company's history. This will have a near-term impact on adjusted operating margin due to the timing difference between when data center costs are first incurred and when we start recognizing revenue. We expect 2025 interest expense in the range of $1.21 billion to $1.25 billion. Moving to CapEx, we now expect 2025 CapEx in the range of $12 billion to $14 billion. We expect this reduction in CapEx from our prior guidance will be mostly reflected by a corresponding increase in construction in progress. As such, the vast majority of the remaining CapEx we have previously anticipated to land in Q4 will now be recognized in Q1.

In closing, we delivered a record third quarter and remain more confident than ever in the long-term trajectory of our business. Our addressable market continues to expand not only as AI adoption proliferates across industries and use cases, but also through deliberate business decisions we've made to broaden our product portfolio and capture greater wallet share across the industry. CoreWeave is reaching escape velocity, scaling more rapidly and efficiently and solidifying our leadership as the essential cloud for AI.

Questions & Answers

Mark R. Murphy (Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC): Thank you, Michael. We hear across the AI landscape that bookings are booming and, obviously, that applies to CoreWeave, but the bottlenecks around power and manpower are just becoming so severe. Can you speak to that situation relating to the third-party provider? Specifically, is it a shortage of power or manpower? Is it something outside of that with GPUs or memory or storage? And then have you spoken to your other third-party providers to get a sense of their own trending relative to schedule?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Let me kind of take that question apart a few different ways, right? So, first of all, you're correct, it is very frustrating for our clients, it's very frustrating for us because of the kind of systemic challenges that exist within the supply chains that are necessary to deliver the global infrastructure that's required for artificial intelligence. Having said that, we have taken a number of steps along the way here to really drive home our ability to manage that environment, which is going to be challenging, into the future. We've really spent a lot of time diversifying our data center providers. We have created a significant portion of the company dedicated to being able to facilitate and assist with the operational component of delivering infrastructure. We've set up our own self-build efforts, including Kenilworth and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

It is a real challenge at the powered shell level, it's not a challenge for power, right? There's plenty of power right now and we believe that there will be ample power for the next couple of years, but really where the challenge is, is the powered shell. We're working with all of our data center providers to do everything we can to facilitate the ultimate delivery of the infrastructure. We've had some incredible success getting infrastructure delivered to us. The infrastructure which is undergoing a delay is not going to impact our backlog and our ability to extract the full value from the contracts that we're going to deliver on.

Keith Weiss (Analyst, Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC): Excellent. Thank you, guys, for taking the question and congratulations on another super impressive quarter in terms of building out that backlog. Mike, I wanted to ask you a question that's been asked of us a lot that we're hearing a lot on CNBC, and it's really about sort of the risk of overcapacity. But I think it's more narrow than that, that people are worried about overcapacity from – or of what's being contracted by AI labs out there. The question I want to ask you though is how we should think about your infrastructure and the infrastructure that you build and how fungible that infrastructure really is. When you're building out for a particular customer, those data centers, is that usable for any customer, is it usable for inference and training, or do you really build to suit to a certain customer that would lock you in and give you kind of less degrees of freedom?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): We just do a great job and we believe that there's a lot of value that we are protecting by providing such a robust software suite to be able to deliver infrastructure. A lot of that flexibility, a lot of that fungibility really does tie back to the incredible software suite that we provide that allows for such effective use of the infrastructure. When SemiAnalysis did their annual kind of review of the alternatives out there, there's a reason that CoreWeave has come back time and time again as singular as the best solution for this type of infrastructure that exists in the world, and that includes the hyperscalers, the neoclouds, and everyone else.

Kash Rangan (Analyst, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC): Hi. Thank you very much and impressive backlog growth. Two things that I wanted to just touch upon. One is, Mike, I think you've talked about how you're going to be diversifying your contractors in the data center side. Maybe you could give us a honest to goodness update on how far are we away from potentially reaching a point where any disruptions that have nothing to do with your business should not affect your revenue outlook. And secondly, in a landscape where we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars being awarded to the hyperscaler giants, what gives you the uniqueness three to four years from now when things have sort of settled into a supply equals demand?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah, thank you. Let me break that question into two pieces. The first question you asked is about diversification and when does it start to stop causing dislocation in our numbers as we're delivering them quarter-to-quarter. As the individual builds become smaller relative to the size of the entire portfolio of data centers that we are running, the impact of being a couple of weeks late will become less and less meaningful. When you're delivering 590 megawatts of power and you have a step function of 200 megawatts or 300 megawatts, it's a material percentage. As we become larger and larger and start to build out the full 2.9 gigawatts of power that we have, having a data center that's 100 megawatts delayed a week or two is not going to have a material impact.

The second part is the question you're asking has been asked of us since we started this business. Why is CoreWeave going to be able to deliver GPUs faster? Why are we going to be able to create software that is going to define the space? And with each quarter, you see us extending the lead with which we have because of the customization of our cloud to the use case that is required. And once again, you saw us in the SemiAnalysis, like we're singular in this. A company that's built singularly to deliver this type of compute will be effective on a go-forward basis. And as Nitin said, we expect the overwhelming majority of that 2.9 gigawatts of power to be brought into service over the next 12 to 24 months.

Tyler Radke (Analyst, Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.): Hey, hopefully, you can hear me okay. Thanks for taking the question. So double-clicking on some of the delays that you called out in the quarter, can you just help us understand the implications on 2026? Just given the visibility you have, particularly on the 24-month component of RPO, how should we be thinking about the revenue implications of the shift? Is this a delay that you think kind of gets fully resolved into Q1? And should we see sort of a step-up in growth rate next year relative to this year?

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah, Tyler, that is correct. The vast majority of the CapEx pushout that we experience in Q4 will be done in Q1. And as you can imagine, we're going to ramp the capacity through the course of Q1 for this. The impact on the total revenue associated with the customer is not impacted here because we've been able to adjust the delivery dates associated with the customer so that the customer keeps the full capacity as well as the contract value associated with it. We will share more details around the 2026 build and our revenue plan in the next earnings, but as we highlighted in this quarter, given the strong customer demand, we expect 2026 CapEx to be well more than double of that of 2025.

Michael Turrin (Analyst, Wells Fargo Securities LLC): Hey, thanks very much. I appreciate you taking the question. I want to just try to tie some of the commentary together, because the bookings growth clearly stands out. What I'm trying to get a better sense of is does this at all impact the cadence at which you're able to sign on new customers or is this more tied to post-ramp signing and one more specific customer environment? And just as a small follow-up, does the NVIDIA deal specifically show up in the backlog metric? It might be useful to hear you expand on what that deal opens up.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Sure. There is no impact on our ability to bring on more clients. We're parallelizing the build of infrastructure. There was a problem at one data center that's impacting us, but there are 41 data centers in our portfolio, all of them are progressing to one extent or another. We have 2.9 gigawatts' worth of contracted power that will come on in the next 12 to 24 months. This one data center will catch up and then we will move forward from there.

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): So, just to follow up with that for a moment there, we're extremely excited about this because what this contract is going to allow us to do is to provide infrastructure to emerging companies, startups, companies that are struggling to get access to the computing infrastructure that they require to be able to build their business. And so, the interruptibility here is an incredibly powerful tool for the resiliency and opportunities for new companies to become part of CoreWeave's broader offering. It is a deal with NVIDIA. They fully underwrite the economics because we will sell the compute to them. And I want to be clear that this really does represent an incredibly disciplined way of financing the compute in order to be able to reach parts of the market that we have been unable to reach.

Brent Thill (Analyst, Jefferies LLC): Nitin, I just wanted to be clear, you cut CapEx by 40% for the year. And just to be clear, this is from one customer correct? This is - you're not assuming other delays across the board, correct?

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): That is correct. So, this is associated with a single provider, data center provider partner and the delays associated with that. And as we talked in our prepared remarks, a large majority of it is going to be recognized in Q1. And in Q4, you're going to see a major impact on build-up of construction in progress associated with the build-up related to it.

Raimo Lenschow (Analyst, Barclays Capital, Inc.): Perfect. Thank you. As we think about the CapEx next year, Nitin and Mike, can you speak as well about the sources of funding a little bit because what we've seen from a lot of the other players is that leasing is coming up a lot more. How do you think about that path for you going forward between the different ways of kind of funding the business, which might give you even more flexibility?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): And so, if leasing is the path, that's the path we'll go. But we've seen a lot of different structures, we've created a lot of different structures that have given us access to capital over the past three years. And we believe that we're going to explore the full suite of those as we look forward. We don't sign customers without knowing where the financing is going to come from. We go deal by deal and we make sure that we have the physical data center spoken for, we have the power spoken for, we have the GPU spoken for, and we have the financing spoken for in order to ensure that we are able to successfully deliver compute to them.

Amit Daryanani (Analyst, Evercore Group LLC): All right. Perfect. Mike, I was hoping if you could just talk about as you shift from third-party data center providers to perhaps do more of your own self-build, how does that impact your CapEx and time to market for power as you go forward? Would love to just understand how do you think that optimal mix looks like and what the CapEx requirements could be.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah. So, I want to be clear, we're not saying that we're going to go self-build and not use third-party data center providers. What we are saying is that self-build is a component of the way that you go about de-risking delivery across the broader portfolio. And so, we're going to go ahead and we're going to continue to work with our partners who provide data center capacity that allow us to co-locate at their facilities. All of that is going to continue to be true.

Brad Zelnick (Analyst, Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.): Great. Thank you so much for taking the question. Mike, with 2.9 gigawatts in committed power and over 1 gigawatt yet to be contracted out to customers, meanwhile, we continue to see a number of other large deals get announced industry-wide. How do you think about and how might you frame for us the pacing on contracting out the remaining capacity given the demand is insatiable out there?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah. So, look, thanks for the question here. The fact that there are other deals getting contracted out there is incredible validation for the supply and demand environment that we have been describing for years now. There is no entity that has the capacity to be able to deliver infrastructure globally in order to meet the demand that's being driven by the largest technology companies in the world, by the largest AI labs in the world, by government, by enterprise. We think that at the end of the day, the product that we deliver, which is a full stack, everything from the hardware all the way through the software, is the most valuable representation of this infrastructure that can be delivered to the market. As far as the remaining capacity goes, we're being very thoughtful about continuing to drive diversification across our cloud. We are allocating that infrastructure to those parties as quickly as we can.

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): And, Brad, couple of things to kind of keep in mind here as we kind of talked about in our prepared remarks. Today, approximately no customer represents greater than approximately 35% of our revenue backlog, which is meaningfully down from where we began the year at 85%, and 60% of our revenue backlog is with investment-grade customers. So, vectors that we are very thoughtful around as we take care of the capacity that we have available to be sold.

Brad Sills (Analyst, BofA Securities, Inc.): (Final question, abridged) What are we doing to position ourselves on a go-forward basis?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah. What I would say is, Brad, I don't think that I would say that our learning has come from this one delay. We've been operating in a systemically supply-constrained market globally now for three years. We understand how difficult it is, and with each additional wave of demand, the market gets tighter and tighter. When you ask what are we doing to position ourselves on a go-forward basis, what I would really encourage you to think about is the fact that we've built out an entire organization within CoreWeave that is capable of helping us build and deliver additional capacity on the self-build side. That's where you embed yourself into the supply chains, you understand where the power is, how it's being contracted. You understand what it takes to build the powered shells because you're doing it yourself, in addition to the fact that you're using other third-party providers. Those are the type of relationships that will enable us to be as successful as possible in what is going to be a challenging environment for quite a while.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Thank you all for joining us today. As we wrap up, I want to emphasize how proud we are of the strong foundation we've built this year and the incredible momentum driving our business forward. Our team's exceptional execution to build the essential AI cloud has positioned CoreWeave to capture a significant and expanding market opportunity. We appreciate your support and engagement and we look forward to updating you on progress next quarter. Thank you. Have a good night.