Coreweave is a stock I have waxed enthusiastic about before. It looks incredibly exciting – explosive growth, incredible story and the chart looks good as far as it goes.
The company is off to a blistering start as a public company.
We are off to an amazing start in 2025. The company has continued its momentum of the last few years. My remarks are going to highlight significant milestones and achievements.
We delivered outstanding Q1 financial performance, highlighted by record revenue of $982 million and a record adjusted operating income of $163 million up 420% and 550% respectively year-on-year.
In Q1, we completed a strategic deal with OpenAI, the contract value for which is up to $11.9 billion. We have also added new enterprise customers and a new hyperscaler and signed expansion agreements with several large customers, including a recent $4 billion expansion with a large AI enterprise, the details of which will be included in our 10-Q.
We announced and completed our acquisition of Weights & Biases, one of the industry’s leading platforms for AI developers with more than 1,400 customers. We are confident our combined companies will allow us to provide additional value to our joint customer base. And we have continued to set new technology performance benchmarks, including being the first to deploy GB200 Grace Blackwell systems at scale on our AI cloud platform, supporting leading AI developers Mistral, IBM and Cohere.
Overall, our financial performance combined with the continued strong trajectory of customer growth and technical achievements demonstrate outstanding execution by our team.
Michael Intrator, CEO, Coreweave, Q1 2025, 14 May 2025
The company is on fire.
CoreWeave’s platform enables the world leading artificial intelligence companies to train AI models and run inference at scale. We are just getting started and demand for our platform is robust and accelerating. In particular, we are excited to see the broad-based increase in demand for inference as well as the accelerating adoption of AI by our enterprise customers. AI growth and adoption remains severely limited by capacity constraints. CoreWeave is scaling as fast as it can to meet the demands of our customers.
While the company is scaling at an unprecedented rate, we are aware of the uncertainties caused by the ongoing volatility in the global trade policy environment. However, in spite of the uncertainties, customer demand is accelerating, which is reflected in the guidance we are issuing today.
Michael Intrator, CEO, Coreweave, Q1 2025, 14 May 2025
Our cloud software and infrastructure services abstract away the complexity of running infrastructure at massive scale and are significantly differentiated in the market. We believe that CoreWeave does this better than anyone else and industry experts agree. In March, SemiAnalysis awarded CoreWeave its highest rating, platinum based on its ClusterMAX rating system. We were the only cloud provider to receive this rating. SemiAnalysis highlighted our industry leadership in operating large scale 10k plus H100 clusters with high reliability. We are proud that we were rated above the established hyperscalers as well as the Neo GPU clouds.
Why is all of this important? AI is the greatest technological revolution of our lifetime, and we believe that the company can create tremendous shareholder value by growing its leadership position.
Today, we benefit from a network of 33 purpose-built AI data centers across the U.S. and Europe, supported by 420 megawatts of active power. Our total contracted power extends to approximately 1.6 gigawatts, providing us with a durable multiyear runway in power capacity. CoreWeave operates at the leading edge of technology, ensuring we deliver superior performance and efficiency to our customers every day.
The world’s most sophisticated AI leaders understand the power of our platform. This has enabled CoreWeave to grow at an unprecedented rate. Today, we serve the most important AI companies in the world. And with Weights and Biases acquisition, we welcome nearly 1,400 more AI labs and enterprises as customers.
We see immense growth opportunities in our future. AI is expected to have a cumulative global economic impact of $20 trillion by 2030. The total addressable market is expected to grow to $400 billion by 2028.
To seize this opportunity and to serve more customers, CoreWeave has led the way in developing innovative financial mechanisms to expand our platform. To date, we have already raised over $21 billion to expand our infrastructure and data center capacity. The IPO was an important milestone in our financing strategy because it expands our access to pools of low-cost capital to fuel our planned rapid expansion.
Michael Intrator, CEO, Coreweave, Q1 2025, 14 May 2025
There is enormous growing demand for advanced AI infrastructure. In addition to the enterprises and labs that we serve, CoreWeave has recently expanded its global footprint. This has enabled the company to expand its offerings in new markets, growing our business with current customers while reaching new ones. In fact, yesterday, we announced the opening of a new data center in Spain in partnership with Merlin Edged with Mistral AI as our anchor client.
As demand for AI infrastructure continues to aggressively grow, CoreWeave will succeed based on its ability to execute and solve the world’s most demanding AI infrastructure challenges.
Today, we have grown our team to about 1,400, including some of the most accomplished and talented in the AI space.
Michael Intrator, CEO, Coreweave, Q1 2025, 14 May 2025
On the face of it, Coreweave looks like a fantastic investment with explosive growth and sitting at the heart of the AI infrastructure boom. But this is a high-risk, high-reward play.
Coreweave buys the latest GPUs from Nvidia, turns them into state-of-the-art data centres, and rents/leases them on long-term contracts to customers like Microsoft and OpenAI, which is almost a subsidiary of Microsoft.
On the plus side, this means its customers get great data centres and Coreweave builds a stream of high-quality income. The worry is that its customers are transferring some of the risk of their massive capex programmes onto Coreweave. As long as demand is booming, Coreweave will flourish, but the minute the AI spending bubble bursts or even starts to lose air, Coreweave could look vulnerable with its data centres depreciating at a furious rate.
There have been computer leasing companies that have boomed and busted in the past. I remember Atlantic Computers. It makes Coreweave look a little like a high-wire act. Against that is the scale of demand, which is massive. Coreweave could confound the sceptics by growing explosively for years.
When it comes to infrastructure, Coreweave doesn’t just take on some of the customer’s risk; it also adds value.
When you think about the requirements for AI, when you think about the type of computing that is required for AI, in order to build the software stack to make it the incredibly expensive infrastructure as performant as possible, you have to go back to a blank sheet of paper and reconstitute how you’re going to support that infrastructure for your clients. And our intention here, initially, when we founded the company, was start from the bottom of the stack and work our way up. The acquisition of Weights & Biases allows us to also provide software solutions that are at the very top of the stack for artificial intelligence.
Our strategy is going to be to populate that software stack with tools that are purpose built and specifically designed to drive efficiency, to drive the quality of the experience, to abstract away the complexity associated with running this type of infrastructure.
Michael Intrator, CEO, Coreweave, Q1 2025, 14 May 2025
What I like about Coreweave is the excitement, and if AI turns into a bubble that pops, the damage to this stock market is going to be wide-ranging. The other way of looking at it is that the computational demands of GenAI are so huge as to be almost infinite. GenAI is still almost at the toy stage compared to where it may be going, so infrastructure demand could just be beginning a gigantic scale-up.
This is what the company says about the demand outlook.
CoreWeave is powering AI innovation at scale. Our cloud platform is purpose built for AI workloads, delivering infrastructure as a service with highly differentiated cloud software and services on top. Yesterday’s, general purpose cloud infrastructure, which is still used to power much of the digital world, was not built to support the scale and complexity of artificial intelligence. These clouds were built to host websites and run SaaS applications, not to run high performance training and inference workloads. The exponential growth and success of our customers’ AI products are driving demand for our differentiated services.
Michael Intrator, CEO, Coreweave, Q1 2025, 14 May 2025
Share Recommendations
Coreweave. CRWV
Strategy – Worth A Punt
The Coppock buy signal on the daily candlestick chart has worked amazingly well so far. I do feel a little cautious about this one, but that may be because I have yet to understand exactly how their business model works. They are blazing with excitement and enthusiasm.
On the face of it, what they do could hardly be more exciting and central to where the global technology revolution is going.
CoreWeave is a cloud purpose-built for scaling, supporting, and accelerating GenAI. We’re a comprehensive platform and strategic partner designed to tackle today—and tomorrow’s—challenges of deploying AI at scale. We manage the complexities of AI growth to make supercomputing accessible and push the limits of what’s possible.
CoreWeave, website
It is so easy to overanalyse companies and shares. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck, it probably is a duck. Coreweave looks like an amazing company playing a pivotal role at the heart of the GenAI revolution; that is probably what it is.
