CoreWeave lit up the AI trade again after reporting fourth-quarter revenue of about $1.6 billion, a 110% jump from a year earlier, and sending its stock up 0.96% to $98.95 in aftermarket trading on February 26, 2026. The cloud provider’s growth machine is still running hot, but the market is now staring past the headline beat and straight at the scale of what comes next: a projected revenue haul of $12 billion to $13 billion in FY2026, paired with capital spending of $30 billion to $35 billion.
The numbers have all the ingredients that keep AI stocks in the center of market conversation: explosive sales growth, a swollen backlog, heavy spending, and Nvidia money in the mix. CoreWeave said contracted revenue backlog reached $66.8 billion, up 342% from a year earlier, underscoring how aggressively demand has been stacking up around the company’s specialized cloud infrastructure. It also ended 2025 with 850 MW of active power capacity, 43 operational data centers, and 3.1 GW of contracted capacity, a footprint that signals just how quickly this business is being scaled.
CoreWeave’s full-year 2025 revenue hit $5.1 billion, up 168% year-over-year. That kind of growth is the kind investors usually reserve for the earliest innings of a breakout software story, not for a company already talking in multi-billion-dollar increments. The quarterly loss numbers, though, show why the stock remains a volatility magnet. CoreWeave reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $452 million and a full-year adjusted net loss of $606 million. In other words, the business is growing fast enough to dominate the narrative, but not fast enough to escape the cost of building at hyperscale.
That tension is the whole trade. Bulls can point to revenue momentum, backlog, and the company’s expanding capacity base as evidence that demand is real and durable. Skeptics can point to the losses and the still-massive spending plan as proof that the business is burning cash to stay ahead of the AI arms race. Both views can be true at once. For now, the market is leaning toward the growth story, and the aftermarket move suggests investors were willing to pay up for the latest confirmation.
One detail likely to keep CoreWeave in the market’s spotlight: Nvidia invested $2 billion into the company during the quarter. That matters because Nvidia sits at the center of the AI hardware boom, and its involvement gives CoreWeave another layer of credibility in a market that often rewards companies that are close to the AI compute bottleneck. The investment does not erase the execution risks, but it helps explain why CoreWeave remains a favored name in one of the market’s most crowded themes.
The scale of the backlog is equally important. A contracted revenue backlog of $66.8 billion suggests customers are committing well in advance to access CoreWeave’s infrastructure. For investors, backlog can be a powerful signal when it is growing this quickly, because it points to future revenue visibility. But it can also become a pressure point if the company cannot build capacity quickly enough or if spending rises even faster than demand. CoreWeave’s business model is now being judged on throughput as much as growth.
Management’s FY2026 guide sets the next stage of the story. CoreWeave expects revenue of $12 billion to $13 billion, which implies roughly 140% to 144% growth at the midpoint. That is an aggressive target even by AI stock standards. It also comes with a projected capital expenditure bill of $30 billion to $35 billion, which tells investors that the company is not planning a gentle expansion. It is planning a major buildout, and fast.
That capex range is the number that may matter most as the year unfolds. A revenue target can excite Wall Street; a spending target tells it what the growth will cost. If CoreWeave can keep turning capacity into contracted demand, the spending will likely be seen as fuel. If the company outruns its own operating leverage, the market could quickly shift from celebrating growth to questioning efficiency. The whole setup makes FY2026 less about one earnings report and more about whether CoreWeave can scale without losing control of the economics.
CoreWeave’s shares are already up approximately 105% over the trailing 12-month period as of the reporting date, so expectations are no longer low. That adds a layer of drama to every update. A company posting triple-digit revenue growth might still look early-stage, but a stock that has already doubled in a year has to keep proving that the thesis is getting stronger, not just louder. The aftermarket gain to $98.95 shows that the latest results did exactly enough to keep buyers engaged.
This is also why the company’s results punch above their weight in the broader AI trade. CoreWeave is not just another high-growth cloud provider; it is part of the infrastructure layer that investors believe can benefit from the explosion in AI compute demand. That makes its revenue, backlog, and capacity figures into market-moving indicators, not just company metrics. When those numbers accelerate, the ripple effect can stretch beyond one ticker and into the wider AI complex.
The next major checkpoint is CoreWeave’s Q1 2026 report, which arrived on May 7, 2026, with revenue of $2.08 billion, up 112% year-over-year, and backlog at $99.4 billion. That update will matter because it shows whether the fourth-quarter surge was a one-off acceleration or part of a broader demand curve that continues to steepen. A backlog moving from $66.8 billion to $99.4 billion is the kind of jump that keeps the market fixated on order flow and capacity expansion.
For now, the story remains straightforward: CoreWeave is growing at a pace that keeps forcing investors to reprice what an AI infrastructure company can become. Revenue is surging. Backlog is ballooning. Nvidia is backing the business with fresh capital. But losses are still substantial, and the next year demands a level of spending that would test almost any company. That combination is exactly why CoreWeave has become one of the market’s most watched AI names — and why every new report is likely to move the stock again.
