CoreWeave and Nebius dropped on their Nasdaq-100 debut, but we're still bullish

This was supposed to be a good day for CoreWeave and Nebius, and it turned into kind of a mess.

Both stocks got added to the Nasdaq-100 on June 22, 2026, which is normally the kind of news that sends a stock up. CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) and Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) were even trading higher overnight. Then the opening bell rang and they both went the other way. It was a pretty textbook case of buy the rumor, sell the news.

Wait, why drop on good news?

Getting into the Nasdaq-100 is a big deal. The index is tracked by hundreds of funds holding something like $800 billion, and all of those funds basically have to go out and buy the new members. That should push prices up, not down.

The problem is that traders saw it coming. The additions were announced back on June 11, and in the weeks after that Nebius ran up about 34% and CoreWeave about 24%. By the time the index funds actually had to buy the shares, most of the move had already happened. So instead of being the moment everyone piled in, the debut became the moment a lot of people cashed out.

CoreWeave had the rougher day

CoreWeave took the bigger hit. It was green before the open, then flipped hard once trading started and fell all the way to $106.61 before climbing back to close around $111.00. That works out to roughly a 5% loss on the day. Not fun, though it's worth remembering the stock is still up around 65% on the year, so this was more of a bad day than a real disaster.

About all that insider selling

There's another thing hanging over CoreWeave that I think is fair to bring up, which is that the people running the company have been selling a lot of stock. Since the lockup from the IPO expired back in August 2025, CoreWeave executives and co-founders have sold more than $2.3 billion worth of shares. Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo accounts for over $1.1 billion of that by himself. CEO Michael Intrator has been selling in steady chunks too, somewhere in the $30 to $39 million range at a time through 2026, including about $35.9 million on June 16. Even the CFO trimmed his stake.

On the surface that looks bad, and honestly it deserves a second look. But the details matter here:

• The sales are basically on autopilot. They go through what are called 10b5-1 plans, which are schedules executives set up ahead of time (the CEO set his up on November 20, 2025) so the selling happens at fixed points no matter what's going on with the news. The whole point of those plans is to keep insiders from trading on stuff the public doesn't know yet.
• The founders still own a ton of the company. Even after selling that $2.3 billion, the three co-founders still hold around 18%. That's not really what it looks like when leadership is quietly heading for the exit. It looks a lot more like a few people taking some money off the table after a massive run while staying very much invested.

I'd still keep an eye on how fast the selling keeps going, because a steady stream of insider shares can hold a stock back. But to me this reads more like normal diversification after a lockup than people losing faith in the business.

So what even is a "neo-cloud"?

Quick explainer, since the term gets thrown around a lot. Neo-clouds are companies that rent out high-end GPU computing, mostly Nvidia chips, specifically for training and running AI models. The big providers like Amazon's AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud do a little of everything. Neo-clouds like CoreWeave and Nebius are built almost entirely around AI work, and they can usually spin up GPU capacity faster and sometimes cheaper.

• CoreWeave is backed by Nvidia, went public in March 2025, and already counts some of the biggest names in AI as customers. It runs on a lot of capital and a big backlog of contracts.
• Nebius came out of the breakup of the old Yandex business, is also backed by Nvidia, and is building AI cloud capacity across Europe and the U.S. It owns a few other things too, including a self-driving company called Avride and an AI data company called Toloka.

The basic case for these companies is pretty simple. There isn't enough AI computing power to go around, the big players can't build it fast enough on their own, and the neo-clouds are stepping in to fill the gap. As long as demand for AI keeps outrunning supply, these are the companies selling the shovels.

And that earlier Nebius drop

One more thing on Nebius, since people sometimes point to its rough stretch in late 2025 as a warning sign. That selloff wasn't really about the business going sideways. It was a financing thing. Back in September 2025 the company raised a pile of money, around $2.75 billion in convertible notes plus roughly $1 billion in new shares (about 10.8 million shares at $92.50), which came out to more than $3.75 billion total. Raising that much new stock at once waters down existing shareholders, so the stock dipped on the news. Nebius did it again in March 2026 with another convertible deal that ended up around $4.34 billion.

The reason that matters is where the money is going. Pretty much all of it is funding GPUs, data centers and power, which is exactly the stuff these companies need to keep up with AI demand. A stock falling because the company is raising money to grow is a very different situation than a stock falling because it's losing customers.

Our take

We're still bullish on the neo-clouds. The drop on debut day looks a lot more like positioning than anything actually breaking. The stocks ran up hard into the index news, people took their profits, and that was that. These companies sit right in the middle of the whole AI buildout, and the money they're raising is going straight into the infrastructure the next few years are going to need.

That doesn't mean they're safe bets. They lean heavily on a handful of huge customers and on Nvidia, they're taking on real debt and dilution to grow, and they bounce around a lot. Days like this one come with the territory. But if you think AI spending is still early, we'd treat a pullback in the leaders as more of an opportunity than a red flag, and we expect CRWV and NBIS to find their footing and head higher once the index dust settles.

This is just our opinion and it's for information only, not investment advice. Do your own research, and maybe talk to an actual financial advisor, before you buy anything.