CoreWeave refuses to pin blame on Core Scientific for AI capacity delays

CoreWeave’s stock dropped by 16% on Tuesday after CEO Mike Intrator addressed delays linked to a third-party data center developer during the company’s most recent earnings report, according to CNBC.

Mike said the quarter went as planned except for a setback involving what he called “a singular data center provider.”

CNBC host Jim Cramer pushed harder during their live interview, saying some believed the delays were tied to multiple sites, not just one.

Jim named data center facilities in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, all of which are associated with Core Scientific, the same company CoreWeave tried to acquire earlier this year for $9 billion before shareholders at Core Scientific voted against the deal.

Mike did not confirm that connection. He kept repeating that the issue involved one provider. Shares of Core Scientific also closed 10% lower on Tuesday.

Company sticks to one-provider explanation

During CoreWeave’s quarterly earnings call on Monday, Mark Murphy, an analyst at JPMorgan Securities, asked Mike directly whether Core Scientific was the provider behind the delay.

Mike declined to name the partner, and then at one point in the call, he said only one data center was affected out of 41 data centers in the company’s broader portfolio.

But at another moment, Nitin Agrawal, the company’s CFO, said the issue came from “a single provider, data center provider partner.”

When asked afterward how many sites were impacted, Mike allegedly told CNBC that teams were physically onsite with contractors and Core Scientific workers “every single day” trying to move construction and readiness forward after noticing the slowdown during the third quarter.

He said the company responded by sending its own staff to the facilities to speed up progress and ensure the planned capacity expansion would not fall further behind schedule.

Mike also told analysts that the delays would not affect the company’s backlog or prevent it from realizing the full value of signed contracts.

Revenue rises, guidance falls, deal pipeline remains large

CoreWeave reported $1.36 billion in revenue for its third quarter, a 134% increase from the $583.9 million posted one year earlier.

Even with the strong revenue growth, the company now forecasts 2025 revenue between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion, lower than the $5.29 billion average estimate from analysts.

The lowered outlook, along with the data center delays, led JPMorgan to downgrade CoreWeave from Overweight to Neutral and reduce its December 2025 price target from $135 to $110, citing rising pressure across infrastructure supply chains.

Despite the downgrade, the analysts said their view of the company’s broader long-term position “remains unchanged,” pointing to increasing demand for high-performance computing capacity across AI development and training workloads.

JPMorgan also said that CoreWeave revenue growth could bounce back in early 2026, assuming the current bottlenecks resolve and planned infrastructure comes online.

CoreWeave has been expanding rapidly as major tech firms compete for GPU-heavy compute.

In September, the company announced a $14.2 billion AI cloud infrastructure agreement with Meta, only days after expanding its existing deal with OpenAI to $22.4 billion. Its backlog nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter to $56 billion, with new customers such as CrowdStrike, Poolside, Rakuten, and Jasper joining the platform.

The delays have become an important test of how fast CoreWeave can turn demand into working infrastructure at scale.

For now, Mike is choosing to hold the line: the company will not publicly blame Core Scientific, even if everyone already knows who the “single provider” is.

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