The Company That Rents Out SI Computers Says Customers Want 10 Times More Than It Has

For weeks the loudest question on Wall Street has been whether the SI boom is running out of road. Tech stocks slid. Some investors started asking if all those giant computer farms would ever pay for themselves.

Then a company most people have never heard of opened its books and said the opposite. Customers want far more computing power than it can build.

CoreWeave, a New Jersey company that rents out warehouses full of SI chips to the firms training and running chatbots, reported its third-quarter results Tuesday afternoon. Revenue hit about $3.7 billion, up 168% from a year earlier, and the company raised its forecast for the full year. By Wednesday, chip stocks from Nvidia to Micron were climbing with it.

Sold out through next year

CoreWeave doesn’t make chips or chatbots. Think of it as a landlord. It buys huge numbers of Nvidia processors, puts them in data centers with the power and cooling they need, and rents that muscle to companies that would rather not build their own.

Right now the landlord has a waiting list. According to Reuters, CoreWeave said it is largely sold out of capacity through next year, with roughly ten times as much demand as it has available.

“Demand for compute is growing faster than the capacity to deliver that infrastructure,” co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator said on the earnings call, as quoted by Yahoo Finance, “and that is being echoed by the expansion of the margins that we are seeing on each additional contract.”

In plain English, customers are lining up and paying more for each new deal.

The company posted the highlights on its own account.

The backlog is the real headline

Quarterly sales are nice. The number that got investors’ attention was the backlog, meaning the revenue customers have already signed contracts to pay in the future.

CoreWeave said its backlog reached about $132.5 billion as of Sept. 30, up from $104 billion at the end of June. That’s roughly $28 billion in new committed business in a single quarter. On the call, the company said more than half of that backlog is tied to contracts where it expects to start delivering by the end of this year.

It also expects to collect about $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits in the next three months alone. Customers don’t hand over that kind of money up front for something they think they won’t need.

Here is how the new forecast compares with what CoreWeave said in August, according to CNBC:

• Full-year 2026 revenue: now $13 billion to $13.3 billion, up from $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $12.86 billion.

• Adjusted operating income: now $1.275 billion to $1.375 billion, up from $960 million to $1.15 billion. Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha were looking for $1.07 billion.

• Year-end pace: CoreWeave now expects to finish 2026 running at $20 billion to $21 billion a year in revenue.

Those are company forecasts, not results, but they beat what the analysts who follow the stock had written down.

Building as fast as the power company allows

The physical side of this story is just as big. CoreWeave said it added more than 200 megawatts of active power last quarter, bringing it past 1.7 gigawatts, double what it had running at the start of the year. It expects more than 1.85 gigawatts by the end of December. Its contracted power overseas now tops 1.3 gigawatts, including sites in India, Indonesia and Spain.

Power is the bottleneck for this whole industry. You can order chips, but you can’t plug them in without electricity, cooling and a building. That is why CoreWeave keeps raising how much it plans to spend. It now expects capital spending of $37 billion to $39 billion this year, raising the low end of its earlier range by $2 billion. Spending in the third quarter alone jumped to $14.5 billion from $9.4 billion the quarter before, Reuters reported.

The catch is the debt

None of this comes cheap, and CoreWeave isn’t hiding it. The company lost $709 million in the quarter, compared with a $110 million loss a year earlier, according to its results release. A big reason is borrowing. Net interest expense was $846 million for the quarter, and the company expects $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion more in the fourth quarter.

That’s the bet in one sentence: borrow heavily now, build fast, and let signed contracts pay it back later. CoreWeave told investors it expects to turn a profit on an adjusted basis in the first half of 2028, according to Reuters.

Finance chief Nitin Agrawal argued the contracts already in hand carry a lot of that load. “Should we choose to focus only on our committed backlog, we would expect capex for 2027 to remain in line with our 2026 capex investment, while revenue and EBITDA grow significantly,” he said, as quoted by CNBC.

In other words, if CoreWeave stopped chasing new deals tomorrow, it says the contracts it already has would let spending level off while money coming in keeps rising.

Why your retirement account noticed

Most people will never rent a rack of SI chips. But plenty own them indirectly through index funds and 401(k)s, and the big chip companies are some of the heaviest weights in those funds.

After closing at $48.73 Tuesday, CoreWeave shares rose 5.7% in after-hours trading to $51.51, according to Investing.com. On Wednesday the rest of the chip world followed. Yahoo Finance reported that AMD and Broadcom rose more than 4% in early trading, Taiwan Semiconductor gained 4%, and Micron, SK Hynix and Sandisk each climbed more than 6%.

Nvidia, which supplies the chips CoreWeave runs, rose roughly 5% for its first gain since its own rough patch began this month. Even with that bounce, Nvidia is still down about 14% in November, Yahoo Finance noted.

One strong quarter doesn’t settle the argument over whether SI spending is too hot. Some skeptics say a few huge buyers are doing most of the ordering and could pull back. CoreWeave’s answer is the paperwork: $132.5 billion in signed contracts and a waiting list it says is ten times longer than its supply.

For a company that only went public last year, that’s quite a receipt. The real test comes when the bills for all that borrowed money arrive, and CoreWeave says the customers will be there to cover them.