CoreWeave’s Q3: A Story of Exploding Demand and Growing Pains
The AI cloud provider beat revenue and earnings estimates, but shares slipped after-hours.
November 10, 2025
CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) reported its third-quarter 2025 earnings today after the bell, delivering a “beat-and-beat” for investors that was nonetheless overshadowed by the immense challenges of rapid growth.
On the surface, the numbers were strong. The specialized AI cloud provider posted:
Revenue: $1.36 billion, beating Wall Street consensus estimates of $1.29 billion.
Adjusted EBITDA: $838 million, also topping expectations of $812 million.
Adjusted Net Loss: $41 million (or an adjusted loss of 8 cents per share), a much narrower loss than the $199 million consensus estimate, showing a clear move toward profitability.
Despite this, the stock fell approximately 6% in after-hours trading.
Key Takeaways from the Release
Here’s the rundown of what’s driving the stock.
1. The Bull Case: Unprecedented Demand The real headline number was not revenue, but revenue backlog. CoreWeave’s backlog—future revenue from committed customer contracts—nearly doubled in a single quarter, exploding from $30.1 billion in Q2 to $55.6 billion.
This growth was fueled by massive, multi-billion dollar expansions with its largest clients, including:
An up to $14.2 billion multi-year deal with Meta.
An up to $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI, bringing its total commitment to $22.4 billion.
This confirms the core thesis: the demand for CoreWeave’s specialized, high-performance AI infrastructure is, for now, seemingly infinite.
2. The Bear Case: Execution Risk is Real So, why did the stock drop? Execution.
During the earnings call, management revealed it is experiencing delays delivering capacity to a key customer. The issue was blamed on a third-party data-center developer running behind schedule.
This delay has a direct financial impact, forcing CoreWeave to lower its full-year 2025 revenue guidance to a range of $5.05 billion to $5.15 billion. While a minor trim, it was enough to spook investors.
3. The Big Picture: Demand vs. Deployment Today’s report perfectly captures the CoreWeave investment thesis. It’s a race between insatiable demand and the physical challenge of building. The company is scaling at a breakneck pace, adding 120 MW of active power in the quarter and becoming the first to deploy NVIDIA’s new GB300 NVL72 systems at scale.
The $55.6 billion backlog proves the demand is locked in. However, the after-hours drop shows that at its current valuation, the market will punish any signal—even a supplier delay—that threatens the company’s ability to execute on that demand.
Here is the updated article with the new paragraph added.
The Ticker Talk
CoreWeave’s Q3: A Story of Exploding Demand and Growing Pains
Subtitle: The AI cloud provider beat revenue and earnings estimates, but shares slipped after-hours on a data center delay and a slight guidance cut.
November 10, 2025
CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) reported its third-quarter 2025 earnings today after the bell, delivering a “beat-and-beat” for investors that was nonetheless overshadowed by the immense challenges of rapid growth.
On the surface, the numbers were strong. The specialized AI cloud provider posted:
Revenue: $1.36 billion, beating Wall Street consensus estimates of $1.29 billion.
Adjusted EBITDA: $838 million, also topping expectations of $812 million.
Adjusted Net Loss: $41 million (or an adjusted loss of 8 cents per share), a much narrower loss than the $199 million consensus estimate, showing a clear move toward profitability.
Despite this, the stock fell approximately 6% in after-hours trading.
Key Takeaways from the Release
Here’s the rundown of what’s driving the stock.
1. The Bull Case: Unprecedented Demand The real headline number was not revenue, but revenue backlog. CoreWeave’s backlog—future revenue from committed customer contracts—nearly doubled in a single quarter, exploding from $30.1 billion in Q2 to $55.6 billion.
This growth was fueled by massive, multi-billion dollar expansions with its largest clients, including:
An up to $14.2 billion multi-year deal with Meta.
An up to $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI, bringing its total commitment to $22.4 billion.
This confirms the core thesis: the demand for CoreWeave’s specialized, high-performance AI infrastructure is, for now, seemingly infinite.
2. The Bear Case: Execution Risk is Real So, why did the stock drop? Execution.
During the earnings call, management revealed it is experiencing delays delivering capacity to a key customer. The issue was blamed on a third-party data-center developer running behind schedule.
This delay has a direct financial impact, forcing CoreWeave to lower its full-year 2025 revenue guidance to a range of $5.05 billion to $5.15 billion. While a minor trim, it was enough to spook investors.
3. The Big Picture: Demand vs. Deployment Today’s report perfectly captures the CoreWeave investment thesis. It’s a race between insatiable demand and the physical challenge of building. The company is scaling at a breakneck pace, adding 120 MW of active power in the quarter and becoming the first to deploy NVIDIA’s new GB300 NVL72 systems at scale.
The $55.6 billion backlog proves the demand is locked in. However, the after-hours drop shows that at its current valuation, the market will punish any signal—even a supplier delay—that threatens the company’s ability to execute on that demand.
📈 Companies to Watch
The CoreWeave story is part of a much larger narrative: the insatiable demand for AI-ready power and infrastructure. This has created one of the hottest trades on the street—the “AI pivot” of Bitcoin miners. These companies built massive, energy-intensive data centers for mining and are now aggressively retooling them to host high-performance AI workloads for Big Tech. For investors, this emerging class of “GPU landlords” is essential to watch.
Cipher Mining (CIFR): Once a pure-play miner, Cipher has transformed into a strategic infrastructure provider. It recently signed a massive 15-year, $5.5 billion data center lease with Amazon’s AWS and has another 10-year deal with Fluidstack, backed by Google.
IREN (IREN): Iren has made a rapid and high-profile pivot to AI. It recently announced a $9.7 billion, five-year cloud services agreement with Microsoft and a separate $5.8 billion GPU purchase agreement with Dell.
Hut 8 (HUT): Hut 8 has a diversified strategy that includes Bitcoin mining, data center cloud services, and a dedicated GPU-as-a-Service brand called “Highrise AI” to capture high-performance computing demand.
TeraWulf (WULF): WULF has also become a key partner for hyperscalers, signing major, long-term AI hosting deals with Fluidstack, which are backed by a $1.8 billion lease guarantee and an equity investment from Google.
The execution risk you mentioned is the real bottlenck for this whole AI infrastrucure build out. CoreWeave's third party data center delay is a perfect example of why companies like IREN with existing power and sites have such an advantage. The $55.6B backlog shows demand is essentially unlimted, but deployment capacity is the real constraint. Intresting that IREN's Microsoft deal includes prepayment which probably helps them avoid some of these third party delays.