So, you know that whole AI boom that's supposed to be a license to print money? Well, sometimes the printing press costs a bit more to run than expected. That's the story from CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV) after it dropped its fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday.
The cloud infrastructure company, which rents out powerful Nvidia (NVDA) GPUs to tech and AI firms, posted numbers that were a classic tale of two metrics. On one hand, the top line was a rocket ship: revenue hit $1.57 billion. That not only beat the Street's expectation of $1.55 billion, but it also more than doubled what the company brought in during the same period last year. They've also got a staggering $66.8 billion in revenue backlog, which is basically a giant "I.O.U." from customers waiting for their GPU time.
On the other hand, the bottom line told a different story. CoreWeave reported an adjusted loss of 56 cents per share. Analysts were expecting a loss of 50 cents. So, while they're bringing in cash hand over fist, they're also spending it—$1.66 billion on operating expenses this quarter, to be exact. They did end the period with a healthy war chest of about $3.13 billion in cash and equivalents, which suggests they're funded to keep growing.
The market's initial reaction was to focus on the loss. Shares slid about 5.15% in after-hours trading, landing around $92.60.
The company's leadership, however, is squarely focused on the growth narrative. "Demand continues to intensify as a broader set of customers adopt CoreWeave Cloud to run a diverse and growing set of workloads," said co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator. "The opportunity ahead is significant, and we are ready to capture it."
CFO Nitin Agrawal doubled down on the optimism, stating plainly, "CoreWeave is well-positioned for sustained hypergrowth."
The company was scheduled to hold an earnings call to discuss the results further and, importantly, to provide forward-looking guidance. For investors, that guidance will be key. The question isn't really whether demand for AI compute is there—CoreWeave's backlog screams that it is. The real question is how quickly and profitably the company can scale to meet that demand without the losses getting too far ahead of the revenue. Thursday's report shows they're still figuring out that balance.
