CoreWeave Inc. said on Thursday it is raising the lower bound of its 2026 capital expenditure forecast as component prices climb, a move that sent the neocloud operator’s stock down more than 9% in extended trading despite a first-quarter revenue beat. The company lifted the low end of its 2026 capex range to $31 billion from $30 billion while leaving the upper limit unchanged at $35 billion.
The disclosure came alongside CoreWeave’s first-quarter results: revenue of $2.08 billion, topping analysts’ average estimate of $1.97 billion, but operating expenses that more than doubled to $2.22 billion. Management said the higher spending reflects continued investment to scale active power capacity and expand data-centre footprint to meet surging demand for AI compute. Chief Financial Officer Nitin Agrawal told analysts those expense increases were a direct result of the company’s rapid capacity build-out.
CEO Michael Intrator defended the strategy, saying CoreWeave is “on a fantastic ramp through the balance of this year into 2027.” In an interview with Reuters, Intrator stressed that the company is focused on long-term growth: “What I’m doing is I’m building a company,” he said, after acknowledging the stock’s sensitivity to quarterly moves. Analysts and investors parsed those comments against the firm’s forward guidance and rising costs.
CoreWeave’s second-quarter revenue outlook — $2.45 billion to $2.6 billion — came in below the Street’s consensus of about $2.69 billion, helping explain the share-price weakness despite the quarter’s top-line beat. Management also pointed to robust commercial momentum: the company said its revenue backlog swelled to $99.4 billion as of March 31 from $66.8 billion at Dec. 31, and that it added more than 400 megawatts of contracted power in the first quarter, bringing total contracted power to more than 3.5 gigawatts.
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The company has continued to lock in long-term commitments from major customers in recent weeks, expanding a cloud-computing arrangement with Meta to $21 billion and inking a $6 billion contract with trading firm Jane Street, along with a deal with AI developer Anthropic. Those large, multi-year agreements underpin CoreWeave’s beefed-up backlog and the rationale for heavy near-term capital spending, executives said.
Industrywide demand for advanced memory, storage and specialized chips used in AI has outstripped supply, driving up component costs and complicating procurement for data-centre builders. CoreWeave cited that supply crunch as a reason for raising the lower end of its capex plan, underscoring how the race to support artificial intelligence workloads is pushing higher upfront investment and pressuring margins for infrastructure providers.
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Some analysts framed CoreWeave’s approach as a deliberate trade-off. Andrew Rocco of Zacks Investment Research likened the company’s willingness to sacrifice near-term profitability to Amazon’s early days in e-commerce, arguing that patients who “stay the course” could see CoreWeave emerge as a dominant AI infrastructure supplier. For now, the combination of rising costs and a conservative near-term revenue outlook left investors less sanguine about the stock’s trajectory.
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