CoreWeave Sees “10x as Much Qualified Demand” as Capacity as Old Nvidia Chips Reprice Higher David Hanson Wed, November 11, 2026 at 2:37 PM EST 6 min read CRWV +23.23% NVDA +3.55% 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's CEO said on its third-quarter call that the company has 10x as much qualified demand as available capacity through 2027, and that pricing on its older Nvidia Ampere and Hopper chips rose 30% to 50% from the second quarter.
Older GPUs come off contract with their loans already repaid, so renting them out again at higher prices may be the most profitable revenue CoreWeave can earn.
Renewals in 2027 would add close to $4 billion of annualized revenue with no new capex, but CoreWeave still spent $9.44 billion on capex in the third quarter alone.
The next test is whether renewal prices hold as more than 130,000 GPUs come off contract in 2027.
CoreWeave (CRWV:NASDAQ) can't build fast enough.
On Tuesday's third-quarter call, CEO Michael Intrator said, "We have 10x as much qualified demand as available capacity through the end of 2027 and demand for 2028 is already several times larger than our available capacity even before we have brought it formally to market."
CoreWeave isn't rushing to fill that demand, either. Intrator said it could sell all of its capacity to buyers already in the queue: "We are choosing not to. We're choosing to be patient."
That's a bold thing to say for a company whose stock had lost more than 40% over the past month on worries about its debt. Shares jumped more than 20% today. But the part of the call I keep coming back to is about Nvidia (NVDA:NASDAQ) chips that are years old.
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"In Q3, pricing for Amperes and Hoppers increased 30% to 50% quarter-over-quarter and at prices above their original contracts," Intrator said. Those are two of Nvidia's earlier generations. CoreWeave also raised prices across the board: about 25% in July, then another 10% later in the quarter.
The older chips are also paid off. Intrator said the delayed-draw loans that financed the early fleet were set up to be fully repaid by the end of each GPU's first contract. So a GPU that comes off contract has no debt left on it.
More than 130,000 GPUs come off contract in 2027, and about 170,000 more in 2028. At current prices, Intrator said, the 2027 renewals "would generate approaching $4 billion of incremental annualized revenue with no additional CapEx required." With 2028's renewals added, he put the figure at nearly $10 billion. CFO Nitin Agrawal said none of that is in CoreWeave's roughly $133 billion backlog.
That $4 billion is more than CoreWeave's entire third-quarter revenue of $3.66 billion. Customers are already paying up front for this capacity, too. CoreWeave expects about $9 billion in prepayments and deposits over the next three months, and more than $3 billion of that is for recontracted capacity.
Analysts were already expecting a lot before the call. Consensus has revenue climbing from $5.13 billion in 2025 to $12.9 billion this year, $26.5 billion in 2027 and $43.7 billion in 2028:
CoreWeave's new 2026 guidance of $13 billion to $13.3 billion already tops that $12.9 billion, so I'd expect these estimates to move up.
CoreWeave isn't the only one seeing this. Last week, IREN's CEO said old Nvidia H100s had recontracted at double their original contract price. That's good news for Nvidia, too. Intrator said CoreWeave is signing multiyear commitments that run past the GPUs' depreciable lives, "driving margins even higher in their later years as price and operating costs remain fixed, but depreciation dissipates." The longer an old Nvidia GPU keeps earning, the easier the next order is to justify. (Nvidia also has a stake in how this plays out: it invested $2 billion in CoreWeave at $87.20 a share in January.)
Intrator said adjusted operating margin rose from about 1% in the first quarter to 5% in the second and above 10% in the third. He put that down to revenue growing on top of investments CoreWeave has already made. Adjusted operating income came in at $379 million, well above the $200 million to $260 million CoreWeave had guided.
TIKR's GAAP operating margin is lower, but it made the same turn, from -6.9% in the first quarter to 5.7% in the third:
And most of the older fleet hasn't come up for renewal yet.
None of this makes CoreWeave cheap to run. It spent $9.44 billion on capex in the third quarter, nearly four times the $2.39 billion it spent a year earlier:
Short seller Jim Chanos said on X that CoreWeave is still taking "$4 in capital to generate $1 in revenues." He also said its annualized revenue per megawatt of active power was "only $9.2M per MW in the 3Q, DOWN Y/Y." After stock-based pay, and assuming a 10-year life for the equipment, he puts the business at a 2% to 3% pre-tax return on capital.
The debt is a burden too. Interest expense was $846 million in the quarter, more than twice adjusted operating income, and CoreWeave expects $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion for the fourth quarter.
Chanos's math covers the fleet CoreWeave is still building and borrowing for. The renewals come from the fleet it has already paid off. For me, that's the most important number on the call. Close to $4 billion of annualized revenue, at prices above the original contracts and with no new capex, shows that the GPUs CoreWeave buys today can keep earning long after their loans are repaid.
Of course, those prices depend on a shortage. Intrator himself said GPU pricing may stay higher for longer if data center construction across the industry slows. If supply catches up instead, the 2027 renewals could come in below today's prices. We'll get more evidence early next year with the fourth-quarter report, as more of those renewals are signed.
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