CoreWeave Q1 Revenue Doubles to $2.08B, Backlog Hits $99.4B — Stock Falls 10% on Light Q2 Guidance
CoreWeave posted $2.08B in Q1 2026 revenue on May 7, beating estimates of $1.97B and doubling the $982M it reported a year earlier. Revenue backlog reached $99.4B — the company calls it the strongest bookings quarter in its history. The stock fell as much as 10% in after-hours trading on guidance that trailed Wall Street expectations.
The Numbers
Revenue: $2.078B (Q1 2026) vs $981.8M (Q1 2025), +111%
Net loss (GAAP): $740M, vs $315M a year ago. Interest expense alone was $536M, reflecting a debt load that crossed $25B at quarter end.
Adjusted EBITDA: $1.157B at a 56% margin — the company is operationally cash-generative before interest, with $2.984B in operating cash flow for the quarter.
Revenue backlog: $99.4B under committed customer contracts as of March 31.
Q2 guidance: $2.45B-$2.6B. The midpoint ($2.53B) trailed LSEG consensus of $2.69B, which is why the stock moved.
Full-year 2026: $12B-$13B guidance maintained. Annualised revenue target of $30B+ by end of 2027 unchanged.
The Infrastructure Numbers
CoreWeave crossed 1 gigawatt of active power in Q1 — a milestone the company is leaning on heavily as a signal of physical scale. The long-range target is 8+ GW by 2030. Total contracted power capacity was expanded by over 400 MW in the quarter to more than 3.5 GW.
NVIDIA bought an additional $2B in CoreWeave shares during Q1. CoreWeave was named NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud for inference on the GB200 NVL72.
The Debt Picture
Total debt was nearly $25B at quarter end. During Q1, CoreWeave closed its $8.5B non-recourse delayed draw term loan facility — a first-of-its-kind A3-rated infrastructure debt structure. Capital expenditure guidance for 2026 was tightened upward: $31B-$35B, with the low end raised from $30B on component pricing.
The company’s cost structure is scaling faster than revenue. Technology and infrastructure costs jumped 127% to $1.27B; sales and marketing increased more than sixfold to $69M. Operating loss was $144M on $2.08B in revenue, but interest expense turns that into a $740M GAAP loss.
What the Miss Means
CoreWeave’s Q2 shortfall relative to consensus is a function of timing, not demand. The backlog is real — $99.4B in committed contracts is not a forward estimate, it is contracted revenue under delivery obligations. The issue is the pace of infrastructure buildout relative to the pace at which revenue can be recognised.
CEO Michael Intrator framed the market shift in terms that matter for model developers: “As the market moves from training to inference, that distinction matters more than ever.” CoreWeave’s customer mix — AI labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises — is shifting toward inference workloads, which have different capacity profiles than training clusters. Recognising that revenue requires the hardware to be deployed and running.
The $99.4B backlog against a $12-$13B full-year revenue target implies roughly 7-8 years of current-pace revenue locked in as committed contracts. That is a financing story, not a demand story.