- CoreWeave more than doubled its Q3 revenue YOY but lowered its 2025 outlook due to vendor delays
- The company is planning to more than double capex in 2026
- Execs say the infrastructure they're building can be repurposed
CoreWeave has work to do – a lot of work. After signing high-profile, multi-billion dollar AI Infrastructure deals with both Meta and OpenAI in September, it ended Q3 with an order backlog of $55.6 billion. And it’s gearing up to spend big to build those customers the capacity they need.
“We now expect 2025 capex in the range of $12 billion to $14 billion,” CFO Nitin Agrawal said. “Given the significant growth in our backlog and continued insatiable demand for our cloud services, we expect capex in 2026 to be well in excess of double that of 2025.”
Translation: CoreWeave’s capex could well climb to nearly $30 billion next year. That’s slightly less that what Amazon and Microsoft spend per quarter, but a stunning amount for a company that is expecting $5.15 billion in revenue or less in 2025.
CoreWeave’s plans align with a broader industry trend of rising data center capex as cloud providers scramble to build the compute necessary to power the AI revolution.
As of the end of Q3, CoreWeave had 590 megawatts (MW) of active power facilities and its contracted pipeline grew to 2.9 gigawatts. It had $6.9 billion worth of projects in construction during the quarter, up $2.8 billion from the previous quarter.
The company more than doubled its revenue year on year to hit $1.36 billion and slashed its net loss by nearly 70% to $110 million. Yet capex of $1.9 billion in Q3 was actually lower than expected thanks to delays suffered by one of CoreWeave’s data center development partners that hampered its ability to deliver contracted capacity on schedule. Still, CoreWeave expects to end the year with more than 850 MW of active power.
“While we are experiencing relentless demand for our platform, data center developers across the industry are also enduring unprecedented pressure across supply chains. In our case, we are affected by temporary delays related to a third-party data center developer who is behind schedule,” CEO Michael Intrator said.
This, he added, will hit CoreWeave’s fourth quarter earnings though will not impact the total value of the contract in question. The company now expects full-year revenue of between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion, down from as much as $5.35 billion previously.
Asked about the risk of overbuilding capacity and whether the infrastructure it's building for pipeline customers can be repurposed for other clients if the original customers begin backing out, Intrator said yes.
“In short, the infrastructure is fungible. It would be able to be transferred from one client to another,” he said. “The infrastructure is built to the most demanding specs so it's able to be used for training, it's able to be used for inference. We really have thought a lot about making sure that we maintain as much optionality, as much flexibility within our infrastructure build as possible.”
CoreWeave’s executives also made a point to emphasize an increase in the diversity of clients making up its backlog.
“Today, no single customer represents more than approximately 35% of our revenue backlog, down from approximately 50% last quarter and even more meaningfully from approximately 85% to begin the year,” Agrawal said.