CoreWeave stock was under pressure on Friday even as the AI cloud company delivered one of the biggest demand signals seen anywhere in the infrastructure race. Shares of CRWV traded lower by roughly 1% to 2% during the session, with the stock around $73.40 in late trading after opening near $72.99 and moving between an intraday low of $71.95 and a high of $75.95. The market’s hesitation came even after CoreWeave reported a staggering $66.8 billion revenue backlog, a figure that offers rare visibility into how aggressively customers are locking in AI compute capacity for years ahead.
The headline number matters because backlog is increasingly becoming one of the most important gauges in the AI infrastructure trade. In CoreWeave’s case, the company said backlog increased more than fourfold in 2025, reflecting a sharp rise in committed customer demand across its cloud platform. Management also made clear that this demand is no longer just about training the largest frontier models. More customers are now reserving infrastructure for inference workloads, the part of the AI stack that powers real-world deployments after models are built. That shift is important because inference is widely expected to become a much larger and more durable driver of compute demand over time.
Key numbers shaping the CoreWeave story right now:
- $66.8 billion revenue backlog at the end of 2025
- $5.13 billion in full-year 2025 revenue
- $1.57 billion in fourth-quarter revenue
- More than 850 megawatts of active power capacity across 43 data centers
- About 3.1 gigawatts of total contracted power capacity
- $30 billion to $35 billion expected 2026 capital expenditures
- $12 billion to $13 billion projected 2026 revenue, implying about 140% year-over-year growth
CoreWeave’s management team also highlighted another major signal buried inside the results: customer contracts are getting longer. The average weighted contract duration has expanded from roughly four years to about five years, showing that customers are not merely reacting to short-term GPU shortages. They are building multiyear roadmaps around CoreWeave’s platform, including current and prior generation GPU deployments and even discussions around future product cycles. That kind of duration suggests deeper dependence on the company’s infrastructure, and it gives investors a clearer framework for modeling long-term revenue conversion.
To keep up with that demand, CoreWeave is scaling at a pace that would have looked extraordinary even a year ago. The company ended 2025 with more than 850 megawatts of active power across 43 data centers, including about 260 megawatts added in the fourth quarter alone. It also contracted nearly two gigawatts of additional power during 2025, bringing its total contracted capacity to roughly 3.1 gigawatts. Most of that capacity is expected to come online by 2027, and management said it ultimately aims to add more than five gigawatts of additional data center capacity by 2030.
That scale-up is not cheap, and it helps explain why investors still see both upside and risk in the name. CoreWeave is guiding for a massive $30 billion to $35 billion in capital expenditures during 2026 as it tries to more than double active power capacity to over 1.7 gigawatts. The company expects every contract tied to new capacity to begin generating revenue by the end of 2026, which is a bullish message for growth. But the other side of that story is leverage, execution risk, and the market’s willingness to keep rewarding companies that spend heavily today in exchange for future AI demand.
The income statement shows why the stock has not simply taken off on backlog alone. CoreWeave reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1.572 billion, up sharply from $747 million a year earlier, while full-year revenue climbed to $5.131 billion from $1.915 billion. Adjusted EBITDA for 2025 reached $3.093 billion. But net loss for the fourth quarter widened to $452 million, and full-year net loss came in at $1.167 billion. Basic net loss per share for the quarter was $0.89. In other words, the company is growing at breakneck speed, but Wall Street is still debating how much near-term pain it is willing to tolerate while that growth is being built out.
Competition is another reason investors are staying selective. Microsoft remains the heavyweight in enterprise cloud, and its latest reported commercial remaining performance obligation of $625 billion underscores just how large the hyperscaler opportunity already is. Microsoft said roughly 25% of that balance is expected to be recognized in revenue over the next 12 months, while the remainder extends beyond that window. A substantial part of the increase was linked to large Azure commitments tied to AI demand, including OpenAI and Anthropic. That matters for CoreWeave because it shows the same demand tailwind is real across the sector, but it also highlights how formidable the incumbent competition remains. For readers wanting to review CoreWeave’s full quarterly update directly, the company’s latest earnings release and outlook lays out the scale of the backlog, power expansion, and 2026 growth targets in detail.
Nebius is another name keeping pressure on the AI cloud group. The company has said demand has exceeded available capacity, sold out compute in recent quarters, and pointed to plans for more than 3 gigawatts of contracted power by the end of 2026, alongside an annualized revenue run-rate target of $7 billion to $9 billion. That does not cancel out CoreWeave’s backlog story, but it does show investors are no longer looking at one clear standalone winner. This is becoming a land-grab market where capital, power access, customer lock-in, and execution speed all matter at once.
There is also a valuation debate hanging over CRWV. The stock has already seen heavy volatility, and while backlog gives the company a compelling long-term demand narrative, investors are still weighing whether the spending curve is moving too fast. The market cap remains sizable, expectations are elevated, and AI infrastructure names are now being priced not just on growth, but on the credibility of turning that growth into durable cash generation later on.
For now, the most important takeaway is that CoreWeave’s latest numbers reinforce one big theme: demand for AI infrastructure is still accelerating, and customers appear willing to commit earlier, for longer, and at larger scale than before. The stock may have slipped on the day, but the $66.8 billion backlog, the push toward 1.7 gigawatts of active power in 2026, and the revenue target of up to $13 billion suggest this remains one of the market’s highest-stakes AI growth stories.
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