5 Reasons Investors Should Not Bet Against CoreWeave Stock

Admittedly, any potential excitement about investing in neocloud company CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) might disappear when looking at the company's balance sheet. As of the end of 2025, it held more than $21 billion in debt, a weighty obligation for a company with $3.3 billion in book value.

However, the company is using that debt to expand its business. That could mean the debt obligations pay off for CoreWeave in the long term, and the cloud stock could deliver outsized returns for five reasons -- that is, the five deals that constitute CoreWeave's current backlog.

Let's look at each one.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

1. Nvidia's circular investment

Nvidia is not only an investor in CoreWeave, it is also its supplier and customer. CoreWeave first secured its future by making a deal with Nvidia in late 2022. The chip giant invested $100 million in the neocloud company while CoreWeave was still private. Nvidia upped that investment by another $250 million in 2025 before adding an additional $2 billion in January 2026.

Nvidia has also become a CoreWeave customer. It pledged to buy more than $6.3 billion worth of CoreWeave services through 2032. Additionally, CoreWeave is a large buyer of Nvidia GPUs. These deals ensure CoreWeave has the latest technology from Nvidia and is often among the first to deploy new platforms, giving the neocloud a competitive advantage over peers.

2. The Microsoft partnership

CoreWeave's first major customer was Microsoft in 2023. This is unique since Microsoft's Azure is the second-largest cloud platform. Still, this helped it secure access to Nvidia H100 GPUs. The deal also came after Microsoft had signed its deal with OpenAI. Partnering with CoreWeave could ensure that OpenAI has enough computing power.

Both parties kept the financial terms of that deal private. However, at the time, this was the majority of CoreWeave's backlog before the neocloud company's later agreements.

3. The OpenAI agreement

In March 2025, CoreWeave went on to partner with OpenAI directly, securing an $11.9 billion deal to provide infrastructure for the ChatGPT parent over the next five years. Two months later, it expanded the agreement by an additional $4 billion, and in January, the size of the agreement expanded by another $6.5 billion, taking the total to $22.4 billion.

Indeed, OpenAI has faced questions as to whether it can honor this deal and others it has made like the $300 billion partnership with Oracle. As a private entity, the government does not require it to publicly disclose its financials. According to OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, it earned only $13 billion in revenue in 2025, though it was three times the 2024 levels.

For now, OpenAI is living up to its agreements, though investors should watch and wait.

4. The Meta Platforms deal

Also, Meta Platforms and CoreWeave recently announced a record-breaking $21 billion deal. Under the terms of the agreement, Meta will scale inference workloads in CoreWeave's platform through 2032. That came after Meta and CoreWeave struck a $14.2 billion cloud infrastructure deal in September, taking the sum total of agreements between the two companies to $35.2 billion, making Meta its largest customer.

The deal will give Meta early access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform, deploying access across multiple locations and helping Meta run some of its most demanding workloads.

5. The Anthropic deal

CoreWeave and Anthropic just announced a multi-year deal. Under its terms, CoreWeave will support development for Claude's AI models and help Anthropic to run workloads at a production scale. The partnership will start later this year, and both companies described the beginning of the deal as a "phased infrastructure rollout" with the potential for expansion. Neither company had disclosed financial details as of the time of this writing.

The current state of CoreWeave's business

The five reasons why are the five key deals that have helped make CoreWeave one of the top AI-native clouds. As of the end of 2025, its revenue backlog had grown to $66.8 billion.

As mentioned, the company has taken on significant debt to fund the massive demand for its compute resources. Still, fulfilling the current backlog (and any future demand) will likely take time, and the company's debt and the uncertainly surrounding the OpenAI deal could put off some investors.

Nonetheless, that concern has taken CoreWeave's price-to-sales (P/S) ratio to 8. Thus, between the aforementioned deals and that low valuation, the stock could surprise investors in 2026.

Will Healy has positions in CoreWeave. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.