Key Takeaways
- CoreWeave shares fell 10% today after Bernstein cut its price target to $51 from $74, as Nebius, IREN and Applied Digital also fell on renewed AI spending fears.
- Bernstein’s Madison Rezaei doesn’t expect CoreWeave to go to zero, citing its backlog and her view that Nvidia would step in, but she sees its fundamentals as stuck.
- The backlog makes CoreWeave hard to kill, but the company still needs outside money to grow, and that money has gotten expensive.
- CoreWeave spent $10.3 billion on capex in 2025 against $3.06 billion of cash from operations, and its third-quarter report next month is the next test.
CoreWeave (CRWV) fell 10% after one of Wall Street’s biggest CoreWeave bears got even more bearish.
Before the open, Bernstein analyst Madison Rezaei cut her price target to $51 from $74 and kept her Underperform rating. Neocloud peers fell too: Nebius Group (NBIS) dropped 7%, IREN (IREN) 8%, and Applied Digital (APLD) 9%, giving back its 10% jump on Wednesday. Chip stocks slid across the board after Lam Research’s results revived fears about AI spending.
TIKR tracks 42 analysts on CoreWeave. How many say “Buy”?
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Even the bear sees a floor
Her new target sits about 18% below Wednesday’s close, and she sees little reason for the business to improve:
“Could this turn around? Maybe: it’s a wildly volatile, momentum-driven stock, but barring major moves, the fundamentals are probably stuck.”
She doesn’t think CoreWeave goes to zero, though, pointing to “a large backlog” and contracts that, while not “super attractive,” are “not underwater.” And she thinks Nvidia (NVDA), which owns about 9% of CoreWeave according to FactSet, “would intervene in a true downside,” which she says “raises the floor.”
That backlog is why analysts expect revenue to more than double to about $12.9 billion this year and reach $43.5 billion by 2028…
The money is the problem
What the backlog doesn’t fix is how CoreWeave pays for that growth. In 2025, it spent $10.3 billion on capital expenditures, more than three times the $3.06 billion its operations brought in…
So it borrows. Total debt went from $2 billion at the end of 2023 to $29.8 billion two years later:
That ties the stock to its bonds, which have slid all month: its unsecured debt yields about 15%, CNBC reported Wednesday evening, and the stock is down 29% in October (through Wednesday’s close). Nebius is down 27% and IREN 32% over the same stretch.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says neocloud demand is “off the charts,” but capital is scarce.
Stuck until the money flows
My take: Rezaei is right that the fundamentals are stuck. The demand and the floor are real, but CoreWeave can only grow as fast as it can raise money, and at 15%, that money eats into whatever those contracts earn.
Of course, that could change. Credit desks told CNBC the high-yield market is effectively on hold until after the midterms in two weeks, and CoreWeave reports third-quarter results next month. If financing opens back up, the stock could turn fast.
So what is CoreWeave stock actually worth?
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Disclaimer:
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