CoreWeave: The Next AI Stock?

CoreWeave stock has advanced 150% since its initial public offering (IPO) in late March. CoreWeave provides GPU-accelerated cloud infrastructure purpose-built for artificial intelligence workloads. The company reported triple-digit sales growth in the first quarter, but interest payments on debt resulted in negative non-GAAP earnings.

AI Market Opportunity

Artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to be one of the most transformative technologies in human history. The International Data Corp. (IDC) says AI will add $19.9 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and Grand View Research estimates spending on AI hardware, software, and services will increase at 36% annually during the same period. Many investors eager to capitalize on that opportunity have bought stock in Palantir Technologies, a software vendor that specializes in analytics. Two years ago, the company introduced AIP, a large language model orchestration tool. Palantir's revenue growth has since accelerated in seven straight quarters, and its share price has advanced 1,500% since May 2023.

CoreWeave as a Potential Successor

CoreWeave held its initial public offering (IPO) on March 28, 2025, and the stock has since advanced 150%, making it a candidate to be the "next Palantir". CoreWeave offers cloud infrastructure and software services. Hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure provide similar products, but CoreWeave operates a GPU cloud. Its data centers support artificial intelligence and other high-performance computing workloads that require GPU acceleration.

Research company SemiAnalysis recently ranked CoreWeave as the best GPU cloud on the market. CoreWeave is usually among the first to deploy the latest Nvidia GPUs due to its close relationship with the chipmaker. For instance, it was first to make Nvidia GB200 NVL72 instances available, which feature 36 interconnected Grace Blackwell Superchips. CoreWeave has generally scored very highly at the MLPerf benchmarks. For instance, CoreWeave achieved record-breaking inference results with Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips in April.

Financial Performance and Considerations

CoreWeave reported first-quarter financial results. Revenue increased 420% to $981 million and adjusted operating income rose 550% to $162 million. However, the company reported a non-GAAP (adjusted) net loss of $150 million, a much larger loss than $24 million in the same quarter last year. Interest payments accounted for the discrepancy between adjusted operating income and adjusted net income. Building AI infrastructure is capital intensive and CoreWeave has $7.8 billion in long-term debt and lease obligations. The interest expense on that debt was $264 million in the first quarter. Interest payments consumed more than a quarter of revenue.

In May, CoreWeave completed its acquisition of AI developer platform Weights & Biases, which extends the utility of its platform. CoreWeave provides the GPU-accelerated infrastructure required for AI workloads, while Weights & Biases provides the tools developers need to train and evaluate AI models, and monitor the performance of AI applications.

CoreWeave currently trades at 18 times sales. For context, Cloudflare trades at 31 times sales, but Microsoft trades at 13 times sales. It is impossible to know exactly how profitable CoreWeave will be in the future, which makes the stock relatively risky. Only investors comfortable with extreme volatility should consider buying shares today.