CoreWeave (CRWV) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Date: February 26, 2026 | Source: CoreWeave Investor Relations / FactSet CallStreet (corrected transcript)

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Operator: Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Tiffany and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CoreWeave Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 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]

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 Annual Report on Form 10-K 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 fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. Joining the call 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. 2025 was a defining year for CoreWeave. We generated more than $5.1 billion of revenue, up 168% year-over-year; grew our contracted revenue backlog to $66.8 billion, an increase of $11.2 billion sequentially and more than $50 billion year-over-year; reached more than 850 megawatts of active power as of December 31; and added approximately twice as many new reserved instance customers in Q4 versus any quarter in our history. We delivered these results while quickly resolving the data center delays we discussed last quarter, delivering the impacted deployments ahead of our Q3 earnings call expectations.

CoreWeave is the fastest cloud in history to reach $5 billion in annual revenue. We remain in the early stages of the most transformative infrastructure build-out in history, and CoreWeave is at the forefront, building and operating some of the largest purpose-built AI clusters for the world's most demanding workloads. Strip away the complexity, and four fundamentals define where we stand: one, a demand environment that remains relentless, driving rapid adoption from an increasingly diversified set of hyperscalers, AI-native and enterprise customers; two, expanding opportunities for new margin-accretive avenues to monetize CoreWeave Cloud, unlocked by the evolution of our platform beyond GPUs and the recent expansion of a partnership with NVIDIA; three, a rapidly growing data center footprint underpinned by unmatched execution and a strategic approach to capacity expansion; and four, a disciplined financial model deliberately designed to invest ahead of revenue to fulfill contracted demand, backed by $66.8 billion in revenue backlog and providing strong visibility into durable cash flows, attractive returns, and the ability to drive down our cost of capital. We will speak to each of those today.

In total for the year, we grew the number of customers committed to spending at least $1 million on CoreWeave Cloud by nearly 150%. These are not one-time infrastructure deployments. They represent sophisticated multiproduct opportunities, the early chapters of enduring platform relationships and a growth engine that compounds as AI becomes more deeply embedded in how these companies operate.

We are also seeing significant increase in demand for prior generations of GPU architectures, where supply also remains constrained. Average H100 pricing in Q4 was within 10% of where it started the year, while average A100 pricing increased in 2025. From our customers, we understand the demand for this infrastructure is largely for inference use cases, which are proliferating rapidly. We are signing this infrastructure into new reserved instance contracts ahead of when it becomes available, firmly putting to bed concerns about demand for older generation SKUs.

With largely all of our new 2026 capacity allocated, we continue to work diligently to expand our footprint to meet the overwhelming needs of existing and prospective customers for both near and long term. In light of the insatiable demand environment and the persistent signals we are seeing from customers, we are accelerating our road map with the objective of adding more than 5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity beyond our already contracted footprint by 2030.

Moving on to new avenues to monetize CoreWeave Cloud. Our platform is evolving as we unlock margin-accretive avenues for growth through new products and services, as well as offering our proprietary cloud stack outside of our data centers to the broader NVIDIA ecosystem. AI natives and enterprise customers are not just consuming our core GPU infrastructure. They are engaging with our unified platform at significantly higher rates across CPU, storage, software and development tools.

This is already showing up across our platform. For example, approximately 80% of CoreWeave Cloud customers paying at least $1 million per year have adopted one or more of our storage products. Additionally, we are seeing strong cross-selling momentum with Weights & Biases, as we added hundreds of millions of CoreWeave Cloud TCV from Weights & Biases customers in the second half of the year. We have also accelerated the development of CoreWeave's proprietary cloud stack, reference architecture and related software solutions, including SUNK and Mission Control, which orchestrate every layer of our purpose-built cloud and increasingly define the CoreWeave customer experience.

In January, we announced NVIDIA intends to test and validate our platform, including our software and reference architectures, to work towards including those offerings within NVIDIA's reference architecture for cloud, enterprise and sovereign customers. Already, we are seeing select customers license SUNK as their default research cluster management platform across their multi-cloud footprint. We expect the broader distribution of our proprietary cloud stack to become a growing source of higher margin revenue over time. This represents tangible, long-term upside potential that is not reflected in the 2026 guidance, as we are providing it today.

Operating at this scale and pace is inherently complex. When disruptions surface, we move decisively through disciplined coordination across teams and partners. We quickly cleared the delays discussed in our third quarter earnings call and, in total, we have now delivered more than 50,000 Grace Blackwells to the impacted customer, deploying servers on a rolling basis and delivering them within weeks of receiving access to the requisite data center infrastructure. We believe CoreWeave is the only cloud platform that can move at this pace while providing the industry-leading performance and reliability that drives customers' trust and allows us to capture additional wallet share.

In Q4, we became the first cloud platform to reach NVIDIA's Exemplar Cloud status for GB200, while remaining SemiAnalysis' sole Platinum ranked AI cloud. We expect to remain at the forefront of execution and innovation across the AI cloud stack as we become one of the first to bring NVIDIA's new Rubin GPU platform to market in the second half of 2026, while expanding our product portfolio to include NVIDIA's Vera CPU and Bluefield storage.

The pace of our execution also explains why our capital expenditures for Q4 came in above guidance. 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. To put our current scale into perspective, according to third-party estimates, CoreWeave today is larger than the 15 largest neoclouds across North America and Europe combined. Bringing more than 260 megawatts online in a single quarter requires simultaneously orchestrating hardware, networking, storage and purpose-built software across more than 100,000 GPUs and millions of interconnected system components, all in near-perfect unison.

Before I turn it over to Nitin, let me leave you with a few final thoughts. We have $66.8 billion of contracted revenue backlog, with every contract for new capacity expected to begin generating revenue by year-end 2026. In 2026, we expect our CapEx will be at least $30 billion, more than 2x the CapEx in 2025. I want to frame that number in clear terms. This is a reflection of the extraordinary amount of contracted demand in front of us. Our revenue backlog has grown to $66.8 billion, and the vast majority of our intended capital deployment is to directly support this long-dated contracted demand, where we have direct visibility into our long-term margins, underpinned by durable cash flow. The dividends of these investments will compound, as you will hear from Nitin, as he provides some commentary around our targets for 2027 and beyond, in addition to our 2026 guidance.

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. Throughout 2025, we executed with discipline against the strategy we laid out for the year, beginning with our IPO. We significantly diversified our customer base, more than doubled our contracted and active power capacity, and strengthened our balance sheet by unlocking new funding sources, while lowering our weighted average cost of capital. We also broadened our product portfolio, both organically and inorganically, successfully completing four strategic acquisitions to pull forward our road map.

Turning now to Q4 results. Revenue was $1.6 billion in Q4, up 110% year-over-year, driven by robust customer demand and exceptional execution. Full-year revenue was approximately $5.1 billion, up 168% year-over-year. Demand for CoreWeave Cloud continues to intensify with revenue backlog for the quarter ended at $66.8 billion, up more than 4x this year alone. As Mike noted, we made significant progress diversifying our customer base across hyperscalers, AI natives and enterprises. Moreover, the customers are committing their foundational AI workloads to CoreWeave for longer periods of time, resulting in the average weighted contract length increasing from roughly four years to roughly five years.

Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $898 million, compared to $486 million in Q4 of 2024, increasing nearly 2x year-over-year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 57%. Adjusted operating income for Q4 was $88 million, compared to $121 million in Q4 of 2024. Our Q4 adjusted operating margin was 6%. Adjusted operating income was lower than expected as a result of deploying infrastructure ahead of our expectations.

Turning to capital expenditures. CapEx in Q4 totaled $8.2 billion and $14.9 billion for the full year, higher than anticipated due to our team's ability to put infrastructure in service ahead of our expectations. The meaningful growth in construction in progress in Q4 to $9.4 billion, an increase of $2.5 billion quarter-over-quarter, reflects the significant scale of infrastructure we are on track to deliver in the near term. As a reminder, construction in progress represents infrastructure not yet in service and not yet being depreciated. The large majority of our term debt is structured as delayed draw facilities, meaning capital is only drawn as the data centers are operationalized.

As of December 31, we had $4.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and marketable securities. We continue to make significant progress in strengthening our capital structure and lowering our weighted average cost of capital. In Q4, we raised approximately $2.6 billion via our inaugural convertible senior notes offering, where investor demand dramatically exceeded the offering size, leading to its upsize. As Mike discussed, in January, we announced the expansion of our commercial relationship with NVIDIA, which was accompanied by a $2 billion investment in CoreWeave. Our efforts in Q4 and over the past year to optimize our financial structure and lower our weighted average cost of capital is evidenced by the 300 basis points decline in our weighted average interest rate during the year, and represents a total reduction of nearly 600 basis points since 2023. We have no debt maturities until 2029, other than self-amortizing contract-backed debt and OEM vendor financing.

Turning to tax, we recorded a noncash tax benefit in Q4, driven primarily by the impact of One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Our tax rate might fluctuate significantly in the future due to similar factors.

We expect 2026 CapEx of $30 billion to $35 billion, which is more than double our 2025 investment. Substantially, all of it is tied to our already signed customer contracts that we intend to bring online this year, as we expect to double our active power capacity to more than 1.7 gigawatts by year-end. As I have described previously, when new capacity comes into service, data center lease costs, including power and depreciation expense commence, while customer revenue ramps over subsequent months. In 2026, this effect is amplified by the scale of our deployment program.

For full-year 2026, we expect revenue of $12 billion to $13 billion, representing approximately 140% growth year-over-year at the midpoint. We expect adjusted operating income of $900 million to $1.1 billion. We anticipate margins will ramp sequentially from low-single digits in Q1, expanding in each of Q2 and Q3, and returning to low-double digit levels by Q4 as deployed capacity matures and revenue scales against the existing cost base. Our 2026 margin progression is a result of deliberate investments we are making to meet the insatiable demand for our platform. As our business and growth normalize, we remain confident in our ability to achieve 25% to 30% margins over the long term. Our mature revenue contracts generate contribution margins in the mid-20s.

Our 2026 guidance excludes any potential meaningful revenue or margin benefits from the further monetization of CoreWeave's proprietary cloud stack to other NVIDIA cloud, enterprise, or sovereign customers, which we do expect to begin in 2026 and to become more meaningful in the coming years. The long-term nature of our contracted revenue backlog provides us with visibility well beyond 2026. As we continue on our hyper-growth trajectory, we expect to exit 2026 with annualized run rate revenue of $17 billion to $19 billion, which we expect to grow to more than $30 billion of annualized run rate revenue as we exit 2027.

We delivered a strong fourth quarter and full year, capping a transformative 2025. We grew our contracted revenue backlog to $66.8 billion, while meaningfully diversifying our customer base, secured more than $18 billion in debt and equity capital at progressively lower costs, and strengthened our platform through new product, services, and strategic acquisitions. We entered 2026 with 850 megawatts of active power across 43 data centers, on track to exceed 1.7 gigawatts by the year-end, with every contract for our new capacity expected to begin generating revenue this year. Thank you. We look forward to your questions.

Questions & Answers

Josh Baer (Analyst, Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC): Hi. This is Josh Baer on for Keith. And thank you for the question. Congrats on a good quarter. You came in nicely ahead on CapEx, and it's great to hear the delivery delays resolved quicker than expected. Trying to align that with seeing the active power, which is more in line and revenue guidance in the range, which is well below like the typical level of upside. So I was hoping you could unpack some of those dynamics. If you're moving faster, why didn't that show up in the active power and the revenue? Maybe it did. Thanks.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Thanks, Josh, for your question. As we deploy capacity, a lot of that capacity came online towards the end of the quarter, and you're going to start seeing the monetization of it in 2026. We continue to build our capacity at a rapid pace. As we talked in our prepared remarks, we will continue to deploy that capacity for 2026 throughout the year as well, including Q1, and that's the impact that you're seeing. Relative to the Q1 number, we are basically providing the guidance for the first time for 2026 and Q1 at this moment.

Amit Daryanani (Analyst, Evercore ISI): Yes. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, my question is really around the cost of financing, especially given the $30 billion-plus kind of CapEx number we have for the year. I'm just wondering, as you continue scaling capacity, can you sort of quantify where you estimate your blended cost of capital is. How has that really evolved over the last 12 months? And when you negotiate with these data center operators, how do they assess your credit profile? Is it really tied to your customer contracts and who they are, or is it something else? And then just on the financing side, does the NVIDIA credit support, the guarantor framework, help translate into a measurable step-down in your borrowing cost, you think, in 2026?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah. Thank you for the question or questions. So, look, we've made incredible progress at the company. As the company matures as a business, as we have more extensive track record of operating this infrastructure, working with the clients, delivering infrastructure, you've seen our cost of capital drop 300 basis points in the last 12 months. You've seen it drop 600 basis points over the last two years. We expect that that will continue. It is a trend that's being driven by our business increasingly performing well with these ETL structures. As far as our relationship with NVIDIA in terms of accelerating our ability to get access to data centers, I think the perspective that you should take here is that, obviously, working with an investment-grade counterparty as the offtake will have an impact on the cost of capital or the cost that is associated with the data center. Obviously, working with NVIDIA, which we do selectively, but certainly not exclusively when we're building out our data center portfolio, will have a positive impact on the costs associated with our data center footprint.

Mark R. Murphy (Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC): Thank you so much. And congratulations on just very, very strong bookings. Mike, some of the AI models have demonstrated a pretty gigantic leap forward in the last couple of months. And the one that's in the headlines is Claude Code. But I don't think we have seen models yet that were fully deeply trained on some of these gigantic Blackwell or GB200 or NVL data centers, really the stuff that CoreWeave has pioneered and mastered. I'm curious what you're hearing in the marketplace just in terms of how those Blackwell-based models are coming along. If we end up seeing GPT-6 or any of the other ones in the next three to six months. Do you think it's going to feel like a huge step forward in their capabilities or is it looking more like a steady evolution on the Blackwell systems?

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Look, the Blackwell systems are amazing, right? They represent the next step function in computing power that allows these data scientists, these companies that are driving the models to be able to build and scale infrastructure in a way that they just haven't been able to historically. And my expectation is, and certainly every indication from the model companies, is that the rate of increasing performance from these models, we're just getting going. Now, it is early in the deployment of Grace Blackwell, right? Like, there are not that many clusters that exist at the size and scale that we talked about, we have already delivered. As those clusters come online within our portfolio, within the global portfolio, I think it stands to reason, and you will see step functions in performance that are associated with this new technology.

Mark R. Murphy (Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC): And Mike, thank you for that. And just by extension, because you just said the word inference, how are you weighing the merits of focusing on the NVIDIA reference architecture? It's obviously very powerful for the massive training runs and some work beyond that. Just the other side would be any inclination to work with custom ASICs that they do legitimately seem to offer better inferencing price performance. And then, obviously, NVIDIA's acquisition of Grok maybe kind of – I don't know if you think that that sort of resets the playing field in a way that seeing NVIDIA reference architecture might kind of reign supreme even for inferencing.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah. So, look, whenever we have these calls, whenever I'm asked about this, I kind of speak to the way that we've gone about building our business, which is we are client-led. Our clients are coming to us and they are telling us that the infrastructure that they need in order to drive their business. And I want to be clear that when they say infrastructure, it's not a training infrastructure, it's not inference infrastructure. It's AI infrastructure, right? And they're coming to us specifically because we're able to deliver such an incredibly performing solution of the NVIDIA technology. They know we're great at it. That's why they come to us. Are they looking for other technologies from other providers? That stands to reason. But what I believe is that – or what I know is that we are unable to catch up with the demand signals that are coming in for the product that we deliver. And so we are going to focus on continuing to drive the solution that we have that is so performant and that has overwhelmed our ability and the market's ability to deliver infrastructure for the past three years.

Brent Thill (Analyst, Jefferies LLC): Hey. Good afternoon. Nitin, I had a quick question just on the guide. And just from a perspective, I know when you look at the revenue guide, you were in line, op income a little lower and your CapEx was way higher. I guess, it just – it kind of illustrates even the guide you gave us all that some of the metrics can really vary. I'm just curious just in terms of how you're thinking about the guide going forward. Are some of the variables out that you've taken out from maybe what you saw in Q4? Are those variables taken out? Or has your guidance changed a little bit? Again, I know this is incredibly difficult to make an estimation, but some of the numbers were effectively kind of outside the range of what you initially gave us.

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): Thanks, Brent, for your question. So from a guide perspective, let me break it down by a few variables here. We talk about the CapEx numbers that is fundamentally in service of our contracted customer backlog, which we disclosed this quarter to be at $66.8 billion. And that's what is driving the investment in our platform. And when you think about the revenue ramp, we talked about that as well that almost all of our – most of our – all of our contracts that we are – our backlog would start generating revenue in this year. So that's the ramp that you are seeing. We delivered 850 megawatts of power in this fiscal year. And for the year, for the 2026, we expect to be at 1.7 gigawatts of power. There is some near-term margin compression as capacity costs ramp ahead of full revenue maturity and recognition. As I mentioned in my remarks, Q1 represents the trough of what we would see in margins. And then from there on, as we scale into the capacity deployed, we will expand margins quarterly from there, returning to low-double digits by Q4. Over the long term, how it manifests itself in our business as its growth normalizes, we remain confident in our ability to achieve 25% to 30% margins.

Gabriela Borges (Analyst, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC): Hey. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Nitin, I wanted to ask you about the diversity of customers that you have on your platform. I'm curious if you can share with us your observations on how the unit economics or how the attractiveness of how these customers are using the CoreWeave platform is different between types of customers. So, a little bit of a broad question. I know that your pricing model is based on dollars per GPU and then the length of the committed contract, but curious if you could share your observations on customer behavior across the different cohorts. Thank you.

Nitin Agrawal (Chief Financial Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah. So I think a lot of this depends upon the variables that we've talked about in terms of how we structure our contracts. The term length, the amount of upfront payment, the generation and the demand for that capacity at that moment, all dictate into it. Fundamentally, as Mike described, our contracts look mostly similar across our customer base with the exception, of course, the volume element that we look at things when we are talking about larger customers versus smaller customers. But across the board in our customer profile, we look to generate similar economics for the infrastructure that we are generating as with the market dynamics go on. Mike talked about how, for Hoppers, we are continuing to see incremental demand and demand of re-contracting those Hoppers at about 10% of the original ASPs when they were first contracted, to A100s where the ASPs are actually increasing as we write newer contracts. Those dynamics are broader market dynamics, but across our customer base, the economics kind of look relatively similar.

Ben Reitzes (Analyst, Melius Research LLC): Great. Thanks so much for taking the question. And congrats on an absolutely amazing year. Just, guys, as we look to Rubin contracts ahead, are you seeing demand for similar five-year duration? And is there anything different about how these deals are priced, the amount of prepayment that you'd expect or anything else? And how should we think about the ROIC on these deals versus prior-generation contracts and the economics that you've outlined in your original S-1? Thank you.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): Yeah. So, thanks. It hasn't even been a year yet, although it does feel like it. I think we've got 11 months under our belt. So, look, in the written statements that we made, we talked a little bit about the fact that one of the trends that we're seeing is the extension of the contracts from an average of four years up to an average of five years. And obviously, that is great for us. It's stabilizing for our business. It gives us a lot of confidence around building and scaling the infrastructure.

Michael Turrin (Analyst, Wells Fargo Securities LLC): Hey. Great. Thanks very much. I appreciate you taking the question. This is for Nitin or Mike. Can you just speak to what gives you confidence in the $30 billion run rate by 2027? And how much of that is already booked versus business your team needs to go get? And maybe as a second part, just if you could speak to any change in demand you're seeing? Mike, you touched on some of the segments of the market, but just any change in demand you're seeing across those segments and how you prioritize across those as well? Thanks very much.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): I'm going to do it in reverse order, if that's okay. One of the things that we, as a business, are very interested in is making sure that we have a diversified perspective on what the compute is being used for. And so we're really out there working with everyone that consumes compute in every way that we can, because we feel like that gives us the best view on where the demand is going to come from. Moving on to your question around the $30 billion run rate, like, what we are doing is we are taking the contracted power that we have and we are projecting out when the existing contracts that have already been sold, and like I said, we are virtually sold out in 2026 of all of our capacity, and then continuing to add contracts that will be allocated once they come online in 2027. And we have vast and sustained interest from our clients to get more capacity to bring on more compute.

Michael Intrator (Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave): All right. So, like I said, we've got 11 months in here, and I appreciate all of you working with us as we've built this company. So as we wrap up here, I want to thank the CoreWeave team and our partners. None of these accomplishments would have been possible without you. I'm incredibly proud and humbled of the execution across the organization from product velocity and innovation to operational excellence and financial rigor. The focus and intensity across our organization is what enables us to continue our hyper-growth trajectory and the size of the incredible opportunity that lies ahead. Thank you, all, for joining us today. We appreciate your support, and we look forward to updating you in the future. Thank you.