Third-quarter 2026 earnings call, November 10, 2026

Pricing power on old and new capacity is the main driver

CoreWeave reported third-quarter revenue of $3.7 billion, up 168% year-over-year and above the high end of guidance, with adjusted operating income of $379 million against guidance of $200 million to $260 million. Adjusted operating margin reached 10%, versus 5% in the second quarter and 1% in the first, which put the company at low double-digit margins one quarter ahead of its plan. CEO Michael Intrator attributed the outperformance to execution, a favorable demand and pricing environment, and the operating leverage that comes with scale.

The most notable disclosure was pricing. Intrator said CoreWeave raised pricing across SKUs by approximately 25% in July, followed by another 10% increase later in the quarter, and that prices have continued to rise in Q4, more than offsetting cost increases. Pricing for Ampere and Hopper GPUs rose 30% to 50% quarter-over-quarter in Q3 and now sits above the original contract prices. CFO Nitin Agrawal said new infrastructure on 4- and 5-year contracts is moving to $20 million to $25 million per megawatt annually, while short-term capacity is selling at up to $40 million per megawatt. Agrawal said, "demand is transforming into pricing power."

Agrawal said short-duration contracts pay back hardware CapEx in 6 to 18 months, while longer-dated contracts pay back in roughly 1 to 2 years at current pricing. CoreWeave is allocating more capacity to short-term opportunities where pricing justifies it, and Intrator described the approach as weighing each contract on revenue, operating cost and financing cost. He added that the company could sell all of its current capacity to buyers in the queue but is choosing to be patient and bring it to market later because it expects better economic output.

The paid-off fleet becomes a source of capital

Management put considerable emphasis on the original fleet coming off contract. More than 130,000 GPUs come off contract in 2027 and about 170,000 more in 2028. At current pricing, Intrator said 2027 renewals would generate approaching $4 billion of incremental annualized revenue with no additional CapEx, rising to nearly $10 billion of annualized incremental revenue including 2028 renewals. Agrawal clarified that these figures sit outside the $133 billion revenue backlog, because they represent the available opportunity at current prices rather than signed contracts.

Because the delayed draw term loans funding these early deployments are repaid over the contract term, the infrastructure is owned free and clear when contracts end. Intrator noted that more than $3 billion of the roughly $9 billion in prepayments and deposits expected over the next three months relates to recontracting existing, fully paid-off infrastructure. In his words, that is "$3 billion that comes into the company that doesn't require any debt service whatsoever." The company is signing multiyear commitments that extend beyond the GPUs' depreciable lives, which Intrator said drives margins higher in later years as depreciation falls away while price and operating costs stay fixed.

Intrator also argued that a slowdown in sector data center construction would help. In that scenario, installed compute becomes scarcer and GPU pricing could stay higher for longer, and CoreWeave's fleet comes off contract years ahead of most others. He said the company does not build its plan on that scenario.

Financing: no unsecured debt at current yields

Against recent capital market volatility, management laid out the funding plan in detail. Intrator said CoreWeave "will not use the unsecured debt market to fund our business at current yields, nor do we need to." Agrawal confirmed the company does not intend to issue additional parent-level unsecured debt through 2027. The weighted average cost of debt was 7.9% at quarter-end, down 250 basis points year-over-year.

The majority of remaining CapEx will be funded through delayed draw term loans matched to specific customer contracts. These can finance 70% to 100% of associated CapEx and have priced at 225 to 550 basis points above SOFR since the IPO, with investment-grade customers at the tight end and AI labs at the wide end. Intrator said that translates to less than 10% at the high end today. CoreWeave has already paid down more than $4 billion of debt through this mechanism, including nearly half of its first two DDTLs, which are the most expensive. Agrawal said the company expects to launch its next DDTL in the coming weeks. It will be an investment-grade facility with multiple rating agencies indicating a high investment-grade rating, expected to price at a 7% to 7.5% yield at current SOFR while financing more than 90% of the associated CapEx. He said the asset-level loans continue to trade around par.

Customer prepayments are the second pillar. CoreWeave has collected prepayments on 70% of its deals this year, with some customers funding up to 100% of contract value upfront, and expects approximately $9 billion of prepayments and deposits in the next three months, a figure it expects to grow in 2027. Management expects EBITDA less interest, which excludes prepayments, to more than double in 2027. OEM financing is a further source, particularly for short-term capacity. Agrawal said that after accounting for all sources, CoreWeave expects to raise less than $5 billion of incremental parent-level capital through 2027. He reiterated that contracted cash flow from existing commitments should be sufficient to service and repay all debt outstanding and planned, secured and unsecured, before counting renewals.

More than 75% of committed CapEx through 2027 is tied to investment-grade and enterprise customers, with the remainder tied to leading AI labs and AI-native companies. CoreWeave also introduced CoreWeave Omni, which extends its platform to third-party infrastructure so customers can run workloads on CoreWeave while owning the hardware. The company has signed its first customer and Agrawal said interest from others is significant.

Guidance and the 2027 CapEx lever

CoreWeave raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $13 billion to $13.3 billion and adjusted operating income guidance to $1.275 billion to $1.375 billion. It now expects exit-rate annualized revenue of $20 billion to $21 billion, and CapEx of $37 billion to $39 billion, up from $35 billion to $39 billion, as deliveries are pulled forward. Q4 interest expense is guided to $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion. Active power is expected to exceed 1.85 gigawatts at year-end, after reaching more than 1.7 gigawatts in Q3, double the level at the start of the year.

The balance sheet shows the cost of the build. Q3 CapEx was $14.5 billion, above the guided range, and net loss was $709 million versus $110 million a year earlier, with interest expense of $846 million versus $310 million. Adjusted net loss was $529 million. Agrawal said adjusted operating income nearly tripled sequentially while interest expense rose about a third, calling that "the path to earnings." CoreWeave expects adjusted net loss to shrink meaningfully in 2027 and to turn to adjusted net income positive in the first half of 2028 and for full-year 2028. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.3 billion, a 62% margin, and operating cash flow was $2 billion. Liquidity stood at $6.5 billion of cash and equivalents, plus nearly $5 billion of undrawn DDTL capacity.

Agrawal said CoreWeave retains flexibility on 2027 and will deploy capital only where demand, financing terms and returns meet its thresholds. If it focuses only on committed backlog, 2027 CapEx would remain in line with 2026 while revenue and EBITDA grow significantly, and the company would still meaningfully exceed its 2027 ARR target. More than $9 billion of required infrastructure already sits in construction in progress, down from $11.9 billion last quarter to $9.3 billion. Backlog grew to approximately $133 billion, up 138% year-over-year, with more than 50% attached to contracts where delivery is expected to start by year-end.

Supply glut, regulation and Texas

Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges asked about the wall of new industry supply and what oversupply would mean for the model. Intrator said the view that infrastructure is arriving faster than demand has prevailed for several years, but that diffusion of the technology is outpacing the ability to deliver tokens and training clusters, as evidenced by margin expansion on each new contract. He said CoreWeave is largely sold out through 2027, and that any 2028 infrastructure placed on the market has been sold. Qualified demand is 10x available capacity through the end of 2027, and 2028 demand is already several times available capacity before being formally marketed.

On cost risk between contract signing and delivery, Agrawal said POs are placed and pricing locked as contracts are signed, and data center sites and operating costs are identified in advance, so economics stay relatively locked.

On regulation, Intrator said CoreWeave does not anticipate any impact from the "seismic regulatory shift" following the elections, citing permitting and construction status of the sites that will host its backlog. In Texas, he said the overwhelming majority of power is online or fully permitted and under construction. He said he wrote to the state's governor-elect to state that CoreWeave is nonpartisan and ready to work with her and host communities. Management does not see material risks to 2027 deliveries. Of 4.6 gigawatts of contracted power, more than 1.3 gigawatts is outside the U.S., spanning Canada, Europe and Asia, with new entries in Indonesia and India and expansion in Denmark and Spain.

Asked by Deutsche Bank's Brad Zelnick about stress among less established AI clouds, Intrator said infrastructure is "a scale game" and that CoreWeave's software and at-scale hardware let it be selective about which clients to take on. He said the company is deliberately not locking in power too far out the curve, coordinating its capacity road map with client needs.

Diversification and the platform

Responding to UBS analyst Karl Keirstead on frontier labs signaling a wish to stand up their own compute, Intrator pointed to customer diversification. 10% of the Fortune 500 are now customers, 10% of backlog comes from financial services, and more than half of new customers this year came from outside AI labs and technology. The number of organizations committing more than $100 million to CoreWeave Cloud rose more than 2.5x year-over-year. He said the company expects long-term relationships with AI labs, hyperscalers and social media companies while building out the enterprise long tail.

CoreWeave Forge, introduced in September, is the entry point for enterprises. Agrawal said 70% of new cloud customers added in Q3 were already Forge customers. Managed inference, launched earlier this year, has exceeded $250 million of booked ARR, with growth constrained primarily by the capacity allocated to it. Named customers include Wayve, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Hippocratic AI, MasterClass, Nissan and Aston Martin Aramco Formula One.

On hardware, Intrator said CoreWeave was the first cloud to bring Nvidia's Vera Rubin online, delivering it to Cognition as the first client in the world with Vera Rubin in production. The company also plans to deploy the Vera CPU independently. Asked about the contribution to guidance, Agrawal pointed to conversion of contracted power, stronger pricing and broader platform adoption rather than to any single product.