Aug 11 (Reuters) - CoreWeave lifted its annual capital spending forecast on Tuesday after beating second-quarter estimates, betting on a surge in demand for its AI cloud computing services, sending the company's shares more than 14% higher in extended trading.
The AI cloud company also lifted its targets for 2026 revenue and adjusted operating profit, encouraged by a ballooning order book, benefits from price increases and more compute capacity coming online this year.
CoreWeave, a so-called neocloud that offers hardware and cloud capacity to other technology companies, has seen demand skyrocket on relentless enterprise spending on AI.
Additionally, its close ties with Nvidia have cemented its position as a key provider of capacity powered by the sought-after Nvidia chips, and helped it draw high-profile customers such as Meta, Claude creator Anthropic and Caterpillar, among others, this year.
CoreWeave reported revenue backlog of $104.2 billion in the second quarter, up from $99.4 billion in the first quarter. On top of that backlog, it has secured more than $25 billion of net new customer commitments so far in the current quarter.
"We outperformed our plan across the board, with the operating leverage we have been building beginning to show up clearly in our results," CEO Michael Intrator said on a post-earnings call.
With its near-term capacity effectively sold out, CoreWeave is securing compute agreements on "increasingly favorable terms," Intrator added.
CoreWeave, which counts cloud giant Microsoft among its biggest customers, has invested rapidly in data centers. It now expects full-year capital expenditure to be between $35 billion and $39 billion, up from its previous expectations of $31 billion to $35 billion.
"The massive contracted backlog guarantees rare multi-year revenue visibility ... This quarter feels like a pivotal one for CoreWeave," said Andrew Rocco, stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research.
CoreWeave said more than half of its current backlog is attached to a contract where customer delivery has already begun.
Its second-quarter revenue more than doubled to $2.58 billion, compared with estimates of $2.56 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. Its adjusted per-share loss of $1.03 was smaller than expectations for a loss of $1.20.
Its capital expenditures reached $9.4 billion in the June quarter, up from $6.8 billion in the prior three-month period.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
