Key Takeaways
- CoreWeave stock jumped 17% after third-quarter revenue rose 168% and the company raised its 2026 guidance.
- CEO Michael Intrator ruled out unsecured debt at current yields, leaning on about $9 billion of expected customer prepayments instead.
- Nebius, IREN, Applied Digital and Cipher Digital rallied on the same funding question.
- Interest still exceeds CoreWeave’s operating profit, but the funding fears behind the selloff look overdone.
CoreWeave (CRWV) stock is up 17% today after the AI cloud raised its outlook and laid out how it will pay for its growth without the bond market. On Tuesday’s third-quarter call, CEO Michael Intrator said: “Looking ahead, we will not use the unsecured debt market to fund our business at current yields, nor do we need to.”
That lifted fellow AI clouds Nebius Group (NBIS) and IREN (IREN), and Applied Digital (APLD) and Cipher Digital (CIFR), which build the data centers those clouds rent.
A quarter ahead of plan
Third-quarter revenue rose 168% to $3.66 billion, adjusted operating income of $379 million beat the top of the $200 million to $260 million guide, and the backlog reached about $132.5 billion. Management raised its 2026 revenue guidance to $13.0 billion to $13.3 billion. Analysts expected revenue to roughly double again in 2027:
The new guidance tops the $12.9 billion analysts expected for 2026, so I’d expect those estimates to move up.
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Customers are the new lenders
With CoreWeave’s unsecured bonds yielding over 17% last week, the stock’s valuation sank:
At 1.2x forward sales on Tuesday’s close, against a 3.5x average over the past year, the market was pricing a company that couldn’t fund itself. Intrator’s answer is about $9 billion of customer prepayments and deposits in the next three months, plus delayed-draw loans matched to specific customer contracts for most of the remaining capex.
That doesn’t shrink the $46.9 billion of borrowings on its balance sheet at Sept. 30. Fourth-quarter interest is guided at $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion, more than the adjusted operating income the full-year guidance implies, and management doesn’t see an adjusted profit until 2028.
The whole group needed this answer
Nebius is up 14% ahead of its own report on Thursday, having recently picked a $3.5 billion senior secured facility from Citigroup over a high-yield bond. IREN, up 9%, already has a customer prepaying 90% of the GPU capex on a five-year contract.
The landlords get paid only if their tenants can fund themselves. Applied Digital, up 9%, has about $11.0 billion of contracted revenue in its CoreWeave lease, 30.4% of its total. Cipher Digital, up 12%, said in its third-quarter update that it had stretched its Barber Lake lease to 20 years, lifting its contracted revenue to $9.1 billion.
The way I see it, the debt selloff went too far, and today’s jump only starts to make it back. Watch for that $9 billion of prepayments in CoreWeave’s fourth-quarter report early next year.
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