CRWV
+6.64%
shares were down in late trading Wednesday after the AI cloud firm reported better-than-expected revenue for its initial quarter as a public company.
The company reported a first-quarter $1.49 earnings per share loss, compared to Wall Street’s consensus estimate for a 12 cent loss, according to FactSet. It is not clear if the earnings numbers are comparable.
Revenue came in at $981.6 million, up 420% year-over-year, which was significantly above analysts’ expectations of $857 million.
“Demand for our platform is robust and accelerating as AI leaders seek the highly performant AI cloud infrastructure required for the most advanced applications,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a press release. “We are scaling as fast as possible to capture that demand.”
CoreWeave shares were initially up as much as 9% in late trading following the release but then fell sharply after management gave its guidance for the year on the company’s earnings call with investors.
CoreWeave said it expects revenue in the current quarter to range from $1.06 billion to $1.1 billion versus the $988 million consensus. For the full year, the company expects revenue to be range from $4.9 billion to $5.1 billion, compared to the $4.66 billion estimate.
Investors were apparently looking for more given CoreWeave’s recent rally. The stock was down 5.4% in late-trading following the guidance update.
In an interview with Barron’s after the call, Intrator said he is optimistic about the future prospects of a new hyperscaler customer that was signed in the first quarter. While he wouldn’t name the new customer, the CoreWeave website now shows Google as a customer.
Intrator also said that the faster Nvidia
NVDA
+4.16%
innovates on new GPUs, the better it is for CoreWeave as they are better equipped to quickly bring the new technology to customers.It has been a wild ride for CoreWeave since the company priced its initial public offering at $40 in late March. The pricing came in below the initial expected range, but the stock has since rallied more than 65% from its offer price as large technology companies gave robust guidance for their 2025 capex spending during earnings season.
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and provides large-scale access to graphics processing units, or GPUs, via the cloud. With physical GPUs expensive and in hot demand, it has become a much needed service for both start-ups and more mature enterprises. CoreWeave also has a close partnership with Nvidia, which invested in the start-up when it was private and as part of the IPO.
Last month, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill initiated coverage on CoreWeave with a Buy rating.
“We believe we’re still in the very early innings of this buildout for AI, and CRWV being one of the few who has been able to scale & host AI compute reliably, is positioned well to capture this opportunity,” he wrote.
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