This AI Stock Soared 92% Last Year. Is It Still a Buy for 2026?

CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) was arguably Wall Street's hottest IPO stock last year. It's been a bumpy ride at times, but CoreWeave stock did return over 92% in 2025. That's an epic success by most standards, and the stock has started this year on a strong note. Shares have already gained 22% since January.

That seems like a pretty juicy pitch. CoreWeave designs and builds turnkey data centers that provide GPU cloud services for artificial intelligence (AI) companies. One might think of the company as something of an arms dealer in the AI wars. Hyperscalers can expand their cloud capacity more quickly by purchasing GPU compute from CoreWeave.

And as much money as AI companies poured into data centers in 2025, those figures will increase dramatically this year. Here is whether CoreWeave stock is still a buy in 2026.

Image source: Getty Images.

Explosive growth on the horizon

It seems the stakes in the AI race keep rising. AI is entering a crucial pivot, where computing for training AI models is giving way to inference, the computing used when AI models perform in real-world applications. Inference-heavy use cases, such as reasoning models, autonomous agents, and AI-powered robotics, represent crucial opportunities to monetize the infrastructure that AI companies have spent the past few years building.

Soaring data center investments have flowed through to CoreWeave. The company's backlog was $55.6 billion as of the third quarter of 2025, up from just $15 billion the year before. Investors can probably bet that backlog will go up when CoreWeave reports fourth-quarter earnings in the coming days.

CoreWeave has guided to full-2025 revenue of just over $5 billion. However, analysts estimate that it will surge to $12 billion this year and $19.5 billion next year. That makes CoreWeave arguably the fastest-growing company on the market right now.

But CoreWeave sits on a razor's edge

It's not a stretch to say that CoreWeave is a pure play in AI data centers. All that growth comes with some potentially serious risks. For instance, CoreWeave caters to AI hyperscalers and earned 86% of its revenue from just four customers in the third quarter. So, losing any one of them would be catastrophic. Remember, losing a customer doesn't have to mean competition. Hyperscalers pulling back on data center spending can have a similar impact.

The second problem is that CoreWeave needs a ton of money up front to build the data centers to support all this growth. CoreWeave has burned through $8 billion over the past four quarters alone. Management is aggressively borrowing and issuing stock to raise money. The company has racked up nearly $18.5 billion in total long-term debt to date.

CRWV Shares Outstanding data by YCharts

Issuing stock dilutes existing shareholders. CoreWeave's revenue and profits are spread across more shares, which steadily depresses the stock price over time. The debt becomes a bigger concern the more CoreWeave borrows. Losing a core customer or seeing hyperscalers pull back would be a disaster, especially if it happened while CoreWeave has all this debt and is losing money.

Is CoreWeave stock still a buy in 2026?

As you can see, far more goes into a stock's story than revenue growth. While CoreWeave boasts explosive revenue growth that investors dream of, it comes with multiple caveats worth considering before buying the stock.

Personally, it's tough to see the stock as a buy right now. CoreWeave trades at 8 to 9 times its trailing 12-month sales, on par with Microsoft and Meta Platforms, two of its customers. No, these companies aren't growing revenue like CoreWeave is, but they do have highly profitable core businesses and aren't facing potential extinction if data center spending drops off, either.

The market is all about AI stocks right now, but CoreWeave represents some unique risks compared to most other AI companies. Investors may want to avoid CoreWeave until the stock's valuation comes way down and the business can fund its expansion without borrowing so much.

Justin Pope has positions in Microsoft. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms and Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.