What CoreWeave is
CoreWeave rents out computing power for AI. It buys Nvidia's GPUs, the chips that train and run AI models, puts them in data centers it runs and rents them by the hour, mostly on contracts that last for years. Companies like it are called neoclouds: cloud providers built only for AI chips. CoreWeave's 2025 annual report calls the company "The Essential Cloud for AI."
Strip out the slogan and it is a landlord. The rooms are full of Nvidia chips, and the rent is paid by the hour.
It is growing fast and losing money. Sales in the second quarter of 2026 were $2,575 million, up from $1,212 million a year earlier. The net loss for the quarter grew from $290 million to $626 million. Debt stood at $35.1 billion on June 30, more than three years of sales at that pace. Net interest took $640 million in the quarter, more than the net loss.
The loss was about a quarter of sales in both years, so growth has not yet made the business cheaper to run per dollar it brings in.
Sales doubled. So did the loss.
Its customers are few and large. Microsoft alone was about 67% of its 2025 sales, by the annual report. By the second quarter of 2026 the biggest customer, which the quarterly report does not name, was down to 36% of sales, from 71% a year earlier, with the next two at 26% and 10%.
If any one of the three leaves, at least a tenth of sales goes with it.
One customer at 71% was a dependency. Three at 72% is called diversification.
CoreWeave also had $103.7 billion of signed contracts left to deliver on June 30, 41% of it within two years. On the August call, chief executive Michael Intrator called its near-term capacity effectively sold out.
Sold out is the best thing a landlord can say. It also means a new customer waits for new capacity. On the same call the finance chief said what building it out takes: debt, customer prepayments and other capital. So more growth means more of what the headlines are about.
Sold out, and borrowing to build more.
Its closest rival on this board is Nebius, number two this week and the company the headlines most often name next to CoreWeave. Nebius also rents out GPUs by the hour.
In the week before this board, almost a third of the CoreWeave headlines Gus collected for this site mentioned debt, bonds or financing. On October 25 Elon Musk wrote of "guppy-level death" for "200+ neoclouds". By CNBC's account it was about debt markets, and CNBC noted that his SpaceX competes with them.
Musk named no neocloud. The headlines took care of that.
Under the debt sit two questions the sites mostly ask one at a time: who is on the other side of CoreWeave's deals, and how long its chips earn money.
Nvidia is on every side of the table
Nvidia makes the chips. Every GPU CoreWeave runs is an Nvidia GPU, and its current customers' contracts specify Nvidia, by its annual report. Nvidia itself billed 17% of everything CoreWeave bought from suppliers in 2025, by the proxy statement, the report to shareholders before the annual meeting.
The chips are also what CoreWeave borrows against. Part of its debt is secured by $18.2 billion of long-term assets, mostly property and equipment, by the quarterly report. For some of its loans, the security is valued at what its GPU servers cost, less depreciation.
Borrow to buy the chips. Then the chips secure the loan.
Nvidia owns the stock: 47.2 million shares, about a tenth of its main class of shares, and its filings show no sales. In January 2026 it paid $2 billion for 22.9 million new shares at $87.20 each.
Nvidia is also a customer. It paid CoreWeave about $326.3 million in 2025, 6.4% of sales. In the first quarter of 2026 it paid $59.6 million; Jane Street, the trading firm, paid $220.6 million.
As a customer Nvidia is small.
In that quarter a trading firm rented more from CoreWeave than the company that makes the chips.
What Nvidia adds is a promise. In September 2025 Nvidia signed an order with an initial value of $6.3 billion, and by CoreWeave's filing about it, Nvidia must buy whatever capacity CoreWeave cannot rent to anyone else, through April 13, 2032.
So Nvidia makes the landlord's chips, owns a tenth of the landlord and has promised to rent the empty rooms.
Nvidia describes the model itself. On deals like this with neoclouds, its chief financial officer Colette Kress said on the call for Nvidia's fiscal second quarter, August 26, 2026:
We're not making loans. In this model, we get paid twice, once on the hardware sale and again through the share of rental revenue.
The hardware and the rental share are paid as they come in. The stock is the only one of the three that depends on what CoreWeave is worth: at the October 26 close of $55.19 the January shares were worth $1.27 billion, $734 million less than Nvidia paid.
Paid twice. On the stock, Nvidia is the one paying.
On October 27 Jim Cramer, the CNBC host, told Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, on X to buy CoreWeave's "15% debt" if he thinks CoreWeave is good for it. The filings show Nvidia with shares and a capacity order. Of the debt, they show none.
The promise to buy has exits. Either side can end the agreement on 30 days' notice of a breach, or if the other enters bankruptcy or insolvency proceedings that are not dismissed within 90 days. So Nvidia can walk away from a CoreWeave in bankruptcy court for more than 90 days, the case the headlines about an Nvidia rescue or backstop circle around: 17 of them in October.
Reassuring.
Nvidia did the same elsewhere. On March 11, less than two months after the January deal, it paid the same $2 billion for a warrant in Nebius: a right to buy shares later at a set price. Nvidia counts 9.3% of Nebius's class A shares, warrant included.
So Nvidia owns about a tenth of CoreWeave and about a tenth of its closest rival. Whichever of the two grows, Nvidia owns a piece of it.
Whichever horse wins, Nvidia owns a tenth of it.
How long a GPU earns money
CoreWeave spreads the cost of its servers over six years. It was five until 2023, when the change cut that year's costs by $20 million. That yearly share of the cost is called depreciation: $1,393 million in the second quarter of 2026, 54.1% of sales. Two years earlier it was 41.6%.
More than half of every dollar of sales now goes to servers wearing out, on paper. So the number of years is not a detail in the accounts: it sets the size of a cost bigger than half of sales.
CoreWeave's annual report lists the estimates it calls critical. The six years is not one of them.
Six years is at the top of the range among the biggest buyers of servers, though none of them reports GPUs separately:
| Company | Server life (years) |
|---|---|
| CoreWeave | 6 |
| Alphabet | 6 |
| Oracle | 6 |
| Microsoft | 2–6 |
| Amazon | 5–6 |
| Meta | 5–5.5 |
| Nebius | 5 (4 until 2026) |
In five years these companies made servers last longer on their books eleven times and shorter once. The once was Amazon, which in 2025 cut part of its servers from six years to five, "particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning." Amazon's reason is the business CoreWeave is in.
CoreWeave's customers sign for about five years on average, by its annual report. The sixth year needs a new contract, and if old chips rent for less by then, that year earns less than the books assume.
The contracts average five. The books say six.
Gus did the napkin math. Spread over five years instead of six, the $33.8 billion of technology equipment on CoreWeave's books on June 30 would cost about $280 million more a quarter. Over four years, about $700 million more. The net loss in the second quarter was $626 million.
At five years that quarter's loss would have been about $900 million. At four, about $1.3 billion. Before any tax effect, with nothing else changed.
The case for six years came on CoreWeave's call in August. The A100 is one of Nvidia's older chips:
We recently signed an A100 contract that extends into 2029 at an attractive price. As a reminder, this SKU was introduced in 2020.
Lambda, another GPU cloud, listed an A100 at $1.50 an hour in June 2023 and lists it at $2.79 now. There, an old chip rents for more now than three years ago.
That is the argument for six years, and it is a real one.
The case against: Amazon Web Services cut its price for renting an H100, a newer chip, by the hour with no contract, by 44% in June 2025. On Silicon Data's index of what GPU hours trade for, an A100 hour cost $1.56 on October 27, against $2.70 on CoreWeave's own list. Nebius lists an H100 at $4.50 an hour, and sells interruptible hours on the same chip, which it can take back, from $0.79.
A list price is what the landlord asks. $0.79 is the floor, for an hour the landlord can take back.
And Nvidia sold Blackwell on cost: for the largest AI models it promised "up to 25x less cost and energy" than the chip before, when it unveiled it in March 2024.
If the new chip does the same work for far less, an hour on the old one is worth less.
Nvidia's best sales pitch for Blackwell is the best argument against the chips CoreWeave already owns.
The next two filings
Two things, and both have dates. CoreWeave reports its third quarter on November 10. The filing shows whether the six years still stand; only the call can say what older chips rent for as their first contracts run out. Nvidia's next holdings report, due around November 14, shows whether it still owned 47.2 million shares on September 30.
Until the next filing, CoreWeave is "essential," sold out and $35.1 billion in debt. Nvidia paid CoreWeave for shares and pays it rent. CoreWeave pays Nvidia for chips. Two companies paying each other with borrowed money. Round and round. Nothing to lose sleep over.
