CoreWeave Stock Forecast: Can AI Demand Justify CRWV’s Debt and Capex?

TradingKey - CoreWeave (CRWV) reported growth in its second quarter, reflecting continued market demand for AI computing services. Revenue for the quarter more than doubled year over year. The company’s backlog continued to grow, and CoreWeave signed a contract worth around $21 billion with Meta. In addition, CoreWeave’s rival, Anthropic, signed a multibillion-dollar deal to include Claude in its services.

Even with a strong second quarter, CRWV saw a 35% drop from its prior peak in May. This drop likely stems from doubts related to profitability, and not uncertainty related to overall market demand. Wall Street is wondering how the company will fund operations related to its computing hardware, as well as construction and operation of new data centers and power systems.

Investors have proven demand for AI computing services is strong, but the company will treat this as a case study to observe market demand for computing services. CoreWeave likely will have a large enough service offering to capture market demand once construction is completed, but it remains to be seen how much of the market demand will actually hit shareholder’s pockets.

Revenue Growth Confirms Demand for AI Compute

CoreWeave’s AI computing service revenue almost doubled during the second quarter. Customers are using services for multiple years, compared to competitors who implement projects with shorter IT expenditure cycles. This generates visibility and largely uninterrupted cash flows for CoreWeave because it is a multi-year contract.

Management’s ability to develop planned infrastructure is based on reserves, and ultimately the potential demand, beyond what is currently offered. The backlog is the company’s metric to gauge demand.

Backlog is not cash and is not recognized as revenue. Construction delays of data centers, power, or GPU delays will make capital and lease costs continual for the company.

Meta Commitment Reaches Approximately $21 Billion

Infrastructure validation with one of the largest and best funded tech companies is very important, and having an agreement with Meta endorses CoreWeave in that regard. With Meta’s alleged $21 billion commitment, it seems that CoreWeave can take on larger deployments with significant competition from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle. 

Furthermore, it further signifies that core strategic importance is reserved for advanced GPU capacity. The contractual terms improve long term revenue visibility, however, it does not eliminate the risk of substantial customer concentration. The contract means a significant business focus for CoreWeave with a limited number of large customers. 

Any change in Meta’s investment schedule would impact capacity and revenue. Furthermore, it has an important signal to NVIDIA. CoreWeave datacenters utilize a significant amount of NVIDIA hardware, networking, and software. The continued business means that demand within the NVIDIA ecosystem is also significant.

Anthropic Agreement Broadens the Customer Base

CoreWeave offers significant computing power to support the training and inference of Claude models via its multibillion-dollar deal with Anthropic. This deal expands CoreWeave's customer base by including one of the prominent AI model makers.

With a small customer base, CoreWeave has a more stable situation due to Anthropic's deal, but still has significant risks. These customers operate in an aggressive market where funds dedicated to AI are quickly expendable based on the performance and priority of the models.

Although having a greater number of large customers is an improvement, it does not equal thousands of small customers. Investors should continue to examine the revenue and backlog concentration with CoreWeave's largest customers.

Backlog Must Convert Into Free Cash Flow

CoreWeave's deal economics diverge from traditional software deals. While revenue can grow quickly, free cash flow can remain negative. Meta's and Anthropic's contracts are only valuable if CoreWeave can utilize capacity to a greater extent at lower financing costs.

This is the primary reason for the stock trading significantly below where it previously was, as investors are valuing the backlog, but also taking into consideration the cost to fulfill that backlog.

Because of the factors listed, gross margin, capital expenditures, interest expenses, utilization, and free cash flow will provide more useful information than simply the growth in revenue. A large backlog can result in weak shareholder returns if the costs associated with serving that backlog are too high.

Debt Increases Sensitivity to Rates and Delays

CoreWeave leverage bald high end NVIDIA hardware through fast growth and debt. That works to their advantage and helps win big client contracts, but it does create exposure to changes in financing and increases interest rates.

The primary risk is not the lack of capital. CoreWeave has proven their ability to bring capital to the table. The aforementioned risks are prolonged customer deployments and a sluggish AI market. The combination of increasing the costs of debt and falling GPU resale values create systemic risk.

Once fully utilized capacity is paired with rapid, consistent contract revenue, debt becomes positive and increases returns. Once capacity remains underutilized and projects take longer than expected, debt creates increasing risk and threatens returns. CoreWeave is more exposed to changes in the economy and credit conditions compared to other companies.

CoreWeave Remains a Direct NVIDIA Proxy

CoreWeave has a built in advantage with their NVIDIA partnership because they have access to previously unavailable accelerators and infrastructure dedicated to AI workloads. This will allow CoreWeave to achieve better performance than the majority of cloud services when it comes to training and serving models.

The greatest risk is NVIDIA. Their pricing, product offerings and the allocation of their hardware will all influence how CoreWeave will be able to serve their clients. If clients begin using AMD or other accelerators or chips more, then CoreWeave’s scaling and income will take a hit.

Right now, the Meta and Anthropic contracts demonstrate that CoreWeave’s NVIDIA architecture will grow, and they will surface investment opportunities for underwriters presenting a significant amount of leverage and risk, compared to NVIDIA.

CRWV Holds $99.84 Support

CoreWeave has been selling around $105.28 after getting rejected from $117.70 and descending trendline. The stock had previously bounced off $60.57 and reclaimed $70.59 and $85.11 and moved above the major moving averages at $92.84 and $89.14.

CRWV Price Chart - Source: Tradingview

While the recovery has not reversed the structure of the broader bear market, buyers will need to retake the 106–110 region in order for another test of $117.70 to become likely. A confirmed break above $117.70 would expose levels at $130.46 and $138.31.

RSI has eased to around 65 after spiking into overbought zone, which indicates the momentum isn’t bearish, but is cooling. The main support remains $99.84. Below that we have moving averages at $85.11 and $60.57.

Jackson Hole Could Affect Financing Sentiment

Due to the nature of its operations, financing conditions could change based on comments from the Federal Reserve at Jackson Hole August 21–22. A lower average interest rate expectation would be bullish on financing to fund its operations.

 The value of future earnings would get adversely impacted due to policy constraints on spending and funding. Investors will also need to watch what Meta and Anthropic spend on AI. The impact of slowing down on other funding would be quicker and more evident to CoreWeave compared to the tech sector as a whole.

Bottom Line

CoreWeave has strong demand due to fast growing revenue and backlog, the multi-billion dollar Meta deal and the Anthropic deal. The execution of the plan is now more important than the demand for investment. Converting backlog to revenue, controlling spending and financing, free cash flow and significant debt are all required by CoreWeave. Technically, $99.84 is a key support level.

Closely holding that level would mean maintaining focus on the $117.70 level with potential breakout targets of $130.46 and $138.31. A breakdown would mean focus on the $92.84 level and potentially $89.14 and $85.11. This is an analysis and not an investment advice.