Strong Q3 revenue overshadowed by trimmed full-year guidance and operational hiccup
CoreWeave (CRWV), the GPU-powered AI cloud infrastructure firm backed by Nvidia Corporation, delivered a stellar third quarter yet saw its full-year 2025 outlook take a hit after a delay at a key third-party data-center partner. The company’s shares dropped more than 10 % in early trading.
In the quarter ending September, CoreWeave posted revenue of $1.36 billion, more than doubling year-over-year and topping expectations of around $1.29 billion. However, the company now forecasts full-year revenue in the range of $5.05 billion to $5.15 billion, down from its previous range of $5.15 billion to $5.35 billion and short of analysts’ average estimate of $5.29 billion.
The shortfall is rooted in a delay at a data centre partner: one of the company’s large-scale facilities was postponed, pushing some expected revenue into future periods. The customer affected has reportedly extended the contract’s expiration date, so the total deal value remains intact—just deferred.
CoreWeave’s transformation is striking: originally a large-scale crypto miner, the company shifted into becoming a critical supplier of AI cloud services, leveraging its GPU capacity to land multibillion-dollar contracts with heavyweights such as Meta Platforms and OpenAI. Yet growth comes with cost. The company’s adjusted operating margin slid to 16 % in Q3 from 21 % a year earlier, reflecting rising hardware costs, aggressive capital investment and intensifying competition.
Looking ahead, CoreWeave plans to double capital spending next year, pointing to the cloud infrastructure arms race that is underway. The firm remains well-positioned in the AI arms build, but the recent guidance cut serves as a reminder of the execution risks inherent in scaling massive data-center operations.
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