Why CoreWeave Rallied on Monday

Shares of AI "neocloud" CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) rallied as much as 11.9% on Monday, before settling into an 8.3% gain as of 12:38 p.m. EDT.

CoreWeave, still well off its highs, had a spate of good news last week, including two major customer deals and a new financing round. While those announcements spurred rallies last week, several Wall Street analysts weighed in with upgrades today.

Wall Street universally applauds big new deals

Last Thursday, CoreWeave announced an expansion of its current long-term agreement with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META), in which Meta committed to $21 billion in spending through 2032. CoreWeave then delivered another piece of good news on Friday, announcing that leading AI lab Anthropic had become a customer. While no specific financial terms were disclosed, CoreWeave announced that the deal will be phased in over time, "with the potential to expand over time."

In conjunction with the two customer announcements, CoreWeave also raised capital through convertible notes and senior notes. Each offering ended up being larger than initially proposed, due to strong investor interest. The convertible notes offering was upsized from $3.0 billion to $3.5 billion, and a senior notes offering was upsized from $1.25 billion to $1.75 billion.

Last week's good news spurred a round of sell-side analyst upgrades today, from Bank of America, Macquarie, D.A. Davidson, and Roth Capital.

Macquarie analyst Paul Golding raised his price target on shares from $90 to $125, saying, "The recent headlines, in our view, validate CRWV's differentiated platform, unique access to hardware, and strategic positioning in AI ecosystems, which, when paired with a growing trend of compute diversification, may mean it is increasingly becoming structural to hyperscalers."

D.A. Davidson raised its price target to $125 to $175, also writing positively on last week's announcements. Bank of America raised its price target from $100 to $120, and Roth Capital raised its price target from $110 to $135.

The signing of Anthropic is a big deal, as Anthropic has emerged as perhaps today's most powerful AI platform following its recent limited release of Mythos, a model so powerful that Anthropic has yet to release it to the broader public.

Image source: Getty Images.

AI demand appears to be accelerating

In addition to the analyst upgrades, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that CoreWeave had raised its prices by some 20% toward the end of 2025, and has asked customers to sign longer-term commitments.

The big question around CoreWeave has always been whether it can recontract older chips once current contracts expire, and whether it can finance its build-out at reasonable interest rates and dilution. But with agentic AI inference taking off over the past few months, there doesn't appear to be any demand slowdown in sight -- quite the opposite, actually, as demand only appears to be accelerating.

Bank of America is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Billy Duberstein and/or his clients have positions in Bank of America and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.