CoreWeave (CRWV) Has a $104B Backlog. Can Its Balance Sheet Keep Up? Maham Fatima Mon, October 12, 2026 at 10:28 AM EDT 5 min read CRWV -2.99% RDDT -4.50% NVDA -1.63% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) has more work lined up than it can build for. At the end of the second quarter of 2026, its revenue backlog (contracted revenue not yet recognized) stood at roughly $104 billion. That figure didn't even include more than $25 billion in net-new customer commitments signed early in the third quarter. Yet the same quarter produced a GAAP net loss of $626 million.
The business itself is simple to describe. CoreWeave fills data centers with Nvidia GPUs and rents that computing power to AI labs, enterprises, and trading firms that would rather not build their own server farms. That massive momentum earned the stock a spot on Reddit's radar, ranking ninth on our list of 10 Stocks That Will Go to the Moon According to Reddit. If you've asked a chatbot something lately, there's a decent chance hardware like CoreWeave's helped answer it.
Demand clearly isn't the problem. The real question is whether a company building this fast, largely on borrowed money, can turn that demand into profit before the bills pile up.
CoreWeave's edge is focus. The big cloud platforms juggle everything from email to storage, while CoreWeave designs its infrastructure around heavy AI workloads. The company says nine of the 10 leading foundation model providers, the firms building the large models behind today's AI tools, trust it with their compute.
Performance backs that up. CoreWeave says it's the only AI cloud to earn the top Platinum ranking in SemiAnalysis's ClusterMAX ratings three times in a row, alongside record MLPerf results in training and inference. For customers spending billions, faster and more reliable clusters are a real reason to stay put, which places CoreWeave among a small group of specialized AI cloud providers, as we detailed in our list for 11 AI Stocks That Will Go to the Moon, taking on the hyperscalers.
The second quarter showed the moat widening in reach. Revenue climbed to $2,575 million from $1,212 million a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, minus certain items) reached $1,510 million, a 59% margin.
New names included Caterpillar, Bentley Systems, Grammarly, and Isomorphic Labs, while Databricks and Hudson River Trading expanded their relationships. Jane Street made a $1 billion strategic investment.
Active power grew by nearly 500 megawatts to 1.5 gigawatts during the quarter, against roughly 3.7 gigawatts under contract. Earlier this month, CoreWeave announced its entry into India, planning 240 megawatts at an AdaniConneX campus in Navi Mumbai, with the first phase expected later this decade. Those halls are slated for Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform, a reminder of how tightly CoreWeave's growth is tied to Nvidia's next generation of chips.
Building at this pace is expensive. CoreWeave spent $6,422 million on property and equipment in the second quarter alone, up from $2,453 million a year earlier. Net interest expense hit $640 million, well above adjusted operating income of $128 million. Adjusted operating margin slid to 5% from 16%.
Funding came from everywhere: more than $10 billion of unsecured debt and convertible bonds, plus a $3.1 billion term loan. A backlog only turns into cash if customers keep paying. If AI spending cools, CoreWeave is left holding the debt and the hardware it bought to serve them.
Still, a 59% adjusted EBITDA margin suggests the rental business itself works. The squeeze comes from financing and depreciation, which is a timing problem as much as a business one.
With losses on the books, CoreWeave has no meaningful P/E to hold up against the sector's 23.35. That pushes the valuation question entirely onto growth. Analysts expect earnings per share to grow 54.04% in 2027, the kind of pace that would mark real progress toward earnings worth valuing.
Here, GAAP results matter more than the adjusted ones. Depreciation and interest aren't accounting noise for CoreWeave; they're the core costs of the model. On that basis, the company lost $1.14 a share in the second quarter.
The backlog is the strongest counterweight. Roughly $104 billion of contracted work dwarfs the $4,653 million of revenue booked in the first half of 2026, which gives the company years of visibility most growth stocks never get. Visibility isn't profit, though, and the stock looks expensive on anything investors can measure today. It's a bet on execution, a challenge explored in our analysis on how IREN Has Microsoft and $14 Billion of Funding, and a trade-off shared by other capital-hungry AI infrastructure stocks.
Hedge fund interest picked up, with 71 funds holding the stock in the most recent quarter, up from 63 in the prior one. At the same time, short interest stands at 17.64% of the float, a sizable bet against the shares.
CoreWeave has answered the demand question convincingly. The open question is whether margins can climb faster than interest costs as new capacity comes online. For investors with a high tolerance for volatility and a long-term belief in AI compute demand, the setup offers rare growth visibility. If adjusted operating income moves back above interest expense, the story strengthens considerably. If margins keep slipping while borrowing climbs, the backlog alone won't be enough.
While we acknowledge the risk and potential of CRWV as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CRWV and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
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