CoreWeave trades close to 2026 peak ahead of Q1 results

CoreWeave will present Q1 results after the markets close on Thursday. The company expects 100% revenue growth, but increasing net losses due to aggressive capital expenditures.

CoreWeave prepares to report with a positive outlook, and its Q1 results may serve as a signal for the AI narrative. CRWV stocks are expected to trade with increased volatility, reflecting past performance during earnings season.

The expectation is for a $1.97B to $2B in quarterly revenues, coinciding with the previous guidance and down from a projected $2.29B. Revenues are still up by around 100% year-on-year.

CoreWeave prepares to gauge the effect of capex spending

CRWV expects a loss of $0.85 to $0.89 per share, mostly due to the large-scale capital expenses for a full pivot to AI. CoreWeave abandoned Ethereum mining during the 2018 bear market, becoming one of the first mining companies to pivot to cloud services.

Later, the company switched to AI data centers with cloud services. CoreWeave is still considered the model and the first mover of the AI pivot, starting much earlier than other crypto miners.

In the past years, CoreWeave took up institutional debt and specialized in AI infrastructure financing. The company mostly taps the debt markets to finance its NVIDIA GPU clusters, accumulating $29.8B in debt. 

CoreWeave has an exclusive focus on GPU-based compute, meaning it is the go-to cloud service for AI startups that cannot get access to their own GPU clusters. The high-speed compute services may be key during the expected wave of agentic AI and other low-latency applications of LLM. 

CoreWeave also partners with Meta (Nasdaq: META), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), and is aggressively investing in data centers for the purposes of OpenAI, the main rival of Anthropic. CoreWeave has one completed and three planned data centers. 

It is precisely the access to GPU clusters that has turned CoreWeave into one of the key companies in the AI space. According to Zacks Research, CoreWeave is a ‘shovels’ company, offering the indispensable hardware component for growing LLM. 

How will CRWV shares move after the Q1 call?

CRWV currently trades at $130.47, near its highest level for 2026. The shares trade with over 18% implied volatility, suggesting futures markets are pricing in higher volatility compared to the 20-day average. 

CRWV has a relatively high short open interest as a percentage of the free float. A total of 14.5% of the free float shares are shorted, with 1.7 days to cover. While CRWV has a ‘hold’ recommendation from Zacks Research, the attempts to short suggest downward volatility, especially after the Q1 earnings call. 

CoreWeave is the bellwether in general sentiment for computation companies, setting the model of balancing its debt and real demand for its services. The performance of CoreWeave may serve as a gauge for companies with similar models. Former miners like Hut8 have also switched to offering GPU compute. 

Core Scientific (Nasdaq: CORZ) is also closely watched, as it prepares to host a 200MW data center for CoreWeave. Iris Energy (Nasdaq: IREN) has set out on its own, acquiring its own fleet of NVIDIA GPUs. IREN is the growth leader for the past five days, with over 33% in stock appreciation.

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