What Could Surprise CoreWeave Stock Investors On The Upside?
CoreWeave (CRWV) stock has lost 37% over the past twelve months, trailing the 17.0% return of the S&P 500. A September 23 news report linked the stock’s fall since May to investor anxiety over the company’s debt load. While the market focuses on what the cloud computing company owes, its upside may lie in the money customers have already committed to pay. So how much work has CoreWeave signed up that it has not yet delivered?
CoreWeave Has $104.2 Billion Of Contracts Still To Deliver
Customers must contract ahead of time for the AI cloud computing capacity that CoreWeave sells. By the end of the second quarter of 2026, the company held $104.2 billion in revenue backlog, which represents contracted sales it has not yet booked. That figure was up 246% from a year earlier, and it excludes more than $25 billion of net new commitments that customers added early in the third quarter.
Executives noted on their August 11 call that delivery has already begun on more than half of that backlog. Fulfilling the remaining contracts requires CoreWeave to bring additional data centers online, and the company recently raised its targets for doing so. It finished the second quarter with 1.5 gigawatts of active power, and by the time of the August call, it had 4.2 gigawatts under contract. Management now expects to reach more than 1.85 gigawatts of active power by the end of 2026, up from an earlier forecast of more than 1.7.
CoreWeave’s Sales Have More Than Doubled In A Year
The company generated $7.6 billion in revenue over the past twelve months, up from $3.5 billion a year earlier. Executives expect those sales figures to keep climbing. They forecast third-quarter revenue between $3.45 billion and $3.6 billion, compared to the $2.6 billion reported for the second quarter. The third quarter has now closed, though CoreWeave has not yet released its results.
Despite that top-line growth, the share price has lagged. CoreWeave stock currently sits 43.0% below its 52-week high. Even after that decline, shares trade at 5.9 times sales, compared to 3.0 for the S&P 500. That premium suggests the market assumes a significant portion of the company’s backlog will successfully translate into revenue.
Can CoreWeave Carry The Debt Behind Its Expansion?
So far, the company has managed its expansion costs by raising external funds, though executives have braced investors for a rising interest bill. CoreWeave spent $9.4 billion on capital projects in the second quarter alone, and management expects between $35 billion and $39 billion for all of 2026. To finance this build-out, the company has secured about $18 billion across debt, convertibles, and equity. In September, it also priced $3.7 billion of convertible senior notes, coming in above the $3.0 billion offering it initially announced. CoreWeave’s debt now equals 112.2% of its market value, against 21.0% for the S&P 500.
Interest expense reached $640 million in the second quarter, a period when CoreWeave reported a net loss of $626 million. Management expects that burden to grow, guiding for interest costs between $860 million and $940 million in the third quarter. Right now, the company’s adjusted operating income is far smaller than its interest cost. It generated $128 million in adjusted operating income during the second quarter, and management forecast a range of $200 million to $260 million for the third.
While CoreWeave has raised its 2026 forecast for active power, its adjusted operating income has not yet caught up with its interest cost. Even if adjusted operating income clears $260 million in the third quarter, beating the top end of management’s forecast, it would show profit growing faster than management planned. That figure would still fall well short of the interest expenses CoreWeave expects to incur over the same period.
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