CoreWeave (CoreWeave (CRWV)) shares took a hit in premarket trading Friday, dropping about 7% after the AI cloud infrastructure company reported a mixed bag of first-quarter results. The headline numbers look impressive — revenue more than doubled — but the market is zeroing in on a wider-than-expected loss and second-quarter guidance that came in below analyst estimates.

Here's the quick math: CoreWeave reported Q1 revenue of $2.08 billion, topping the $1.97 billion analysts were looking for. That's a 112% jump from a year ago. But the company posted an adjusted loss of $1.12 per share, worse than the 90-cent loss Wall Street had penciled in. Profitability remains elusive as the company spends heavily to build out AI infrastructure.

The company ended the quarter with a revenue backlog of $99.4 billion, a staggering figure that speaks to the long-term demand for AI compute. During the quarter, CoreWeave secured more than $40 billion in new customer commitments — its strongest bookings period ever. That's the kind of number that usually gets investors excited, but the near-term guidance is giving them pause.

AI Infrastructure: Building at Breakneck Speed

CoreWeave is in the middle of a massive expansion. The company added more than 400 megawatts of contracted power in the quarter, bringing total contracted capacity to over 3.5 gigawatts. Most of that is expected to come online by 2027. The company now has 10 customers each committed to spending at least $1 billion, a sign that enterprise demand for AI infrastructure is real and growing.

Demand is strong across Nvidia GPU generations — Ampere, Hopper, and Blackwell systems — and near-term capacity is largely sold out through 2026. Pricing actually increased sequentially across GPU tiers as demand for both AI training and inference workloads continued to rise. That's a good sign for pricing power.

Nvidia Partnership Gets Bigger

CoreWeave also expanded its relationship with Nvidia (NVDA), announcing plans to accelerate the development of more than 5 gigawatts of AI factories by 2030. Speaking with CNBC, CEO Michael Intrator said Nvidia's growing infrastructure investments underscore the urgency of maintaining sufficient compute capacity across the AI ecosystem.

The company highlighted major customer wins, including Anthropic for Claude model workloads and an expanded agreement with Meta Platforms Inc. that includes a $21 billion contract announced in April. These are big names with big budgets, and they're betting on CoreWeave to deliver the compute power they need.

Guidance: The Near-Term Hiccup

For the full year, CoreWeave reaffirmed its revenue guidance of $12 billion to $13 billion, right around the $12.5 billion consensus. It also reiterated adjusted operating income guidance of $900 million to $1.1 billion. So the long-term story is intact.

But the second quarter is where things get sticky. CoreWeave expects Q2 revenue of $2.45 billion to $2.6 billion, below the $2.69 billion analysts were expecting. It forecast adjusted operating income of just $30 million to $90 million, suggesting profitability is still a work in progress. The company raised its capital expenditures guidance to $31 billion to $35 billion, citing accelerated data center expansion and higher infrastructure costs. That's a lot of spending, and investors are understandably nervous about when the payoff will come.

CoreWeave says it expects to exit 2026 with an annualized revenue run rate of $18 billion to $19 billion and sees a path toward more than $30 billion in annualized revenue by 2027. More than 75% of expected 2027 revenue is already under contract, which provides some visibility. But for now, the market is focused on the near-term miss.

Shares were trading at $119.40 in premarket, down 7.33% from the previous close. The selloff reflects the tension between a booming long-term opportunity and the messy reality of building infrastructure at scale. CoreWeave is playing the long game, but Wall Street is grading it on the quarter.