Key points
- CoreWeave (CRWV) beat on revenue and jumped about 15% after hours on its Q2 report.
- Five days earlier, Jim Cramer told a caller to buy CRWV over IREN, calling it "cheaper and better."
- Q2 revenue hit $2.58 billion, up 112%, with a backlog of $104 billion before $25 billion in July deals.
- Nebius (NBIS) reports Wednesday before the open and is up after hours in sympathy with CoreWeave.
CoreWeave (CRWV) just reported earnings, and it came in better than expected. The stock drifted up a little during the day, then earnings hit, and it spiked up after hours trading up around 15%. Add everything up, and it's now sitting about 65% above its low from earlier this year.
The quarter earned it. Revenue came in at $2.58 billion against $2.56 billion, and grew 112% from a year ago. The adjusted loss was $1.03 a share when it was estimated at $1.20. The number I care about most is the backlog. CoreWeave says it's sitting on $104 billion in booked future revenue, up from $99.4 billion three months earlier, and that doesn't even count the $25 billion-plus in fresh deals it signed in early July.
CEO Michael Intrator kept it plain in the release. "Customer demand is accelerating, as enterprise adoption broadens and we continue to deepen our technology platform," he said. For once the backlog actually backs up the talk. CoreWeave keeps stacking deals, too. This quarter it grew its deal with Meta (META) to around $21 billion and agreed to host Anthropic's Claude models, and last week it locked up priority SSD supply from SK Hynix's Solidigm, which we broke down here.
The part I keep coming back to is the timing. On the August 6 Mad Money, five days before this print, a caller asked Jim Cramer about IREN. Cramer didn't hedge. "If you like IREN, you got to go buy CoreWeave," he said, then, "CoreWeave is cheaper and better, okay?" His case was scale and visibility. CoreWeave does roughly 130 times the revenue IREN does, and it's still doubling sales every quarter. IREN's the smaller miner-turned-AI-cloud name, part of the same crossover we covered when Riot Platforms (RIOT) landed a $9.1 billion AI lease last week.
Now, the inverse-Cramer crowd exists for a reason, and betting against his calls has paid the bills for plenty of people. This wasn't one of those weeks. Fade him into this print and short CoreWeave, and you got run over. The call aged about as well as a call can age in five trading days.
I'm not going to pretend it's a clean story. CoreWeave's burned a ton of cash to build all this. Free cash flow ran negative $5.7 billion in the quarter, and the whole bull case rests on that $104 billion backlog turning into paid revenue on schedule. Analyst Shay Boloor framed the real test before the report, saying CoreWeave has to prove whether "the revenue ramp can actually catch up" to the backlog. Tuesday night was a point for the bulls on that. It wasn't the final word.
Which brings me to tomorrow. Nebius (NBIS) reports Wednesday before the open, and it's the same trade in a different jersey. Nebius is the European neocloud, and tonight it's up after hours in sympathy with CoreWeave before reporting a number. What people care about is the ARR guide. Nebius ended the first quarter with $1.92 billion in annual recurring revenue and told investors to expect $7 to $9 billion by the end of 2026. If it lifts that number again, this whole group probably gets another leg up.
The catch is the spending. Nebius just raised its 2026 capital budget to somewhere between $20 and $25 billion, a massive number for a company its size. Goldman Sachs walked in bullish and slapped a street-high target on the stock. Not everyone's convinced. Michael Burry shorted Nebius at $211.77, which we covered when his filing showed up. So the bar's high and there are real shorts in the name. A stock up this much going into a print has plenty of room to fall if the guide comes in soft.
All three big neocloud names popped after hours Tuesday.
| Neocloud name | Move after hours (Aug 11) |
|---|---|
| CoreWeave (CRWV) | up about 15% |
| Nebius (NBIS) | up about 6% |
| IREN | up about 4% |
My read's simple. CoreWeave proved the demand is real. Now Nebius has to back it up in the morning. I'll be locked in on that 8 a.m. call. If Nebius raises the ARR guide, the neocloud trade isn't finished, and the group runs further. A soft guide, or spending that scares people, and we'll find out fast how much of Tuesday night was really about CoreWeave and how much was just everyone piling into the theme.
This is general market commentary and opinion, not investment advice. Markets can go down as well as up, and you can lose money. Always do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decision.
