CoreWeave grows 112% and burns $5.7bn doing it
Q2 revenue of $2.58bn was up 112% year on year and beat expectations; free cash flow ran to negative $5.74bn on GPU capacity spending. Capex guidance rose to $35–39bn from $31–35bn, backlog stands near $104bn, and the stock climbed 14% after hours.
This is the clearest invoice the AI buildout has yet handed the public markets, and the market's response to it was to buy. Both halves of that sentence matter.
The operating picture is genuinely strong: $2.58bn in the quarter, up 112%, operating cash flow positive, a revenue backlog around $104bn as of 30 June that excludes more than $25bn in commitments added in early Q3. Full-year guidance moved to $12.4–13.2bn of revenue and $960m–1.15bn of adjusted operating income. Companies do not usually raise capex guidance by $4bn into a demand question they are unsure about.
The financing picture is the other half. Negative $5.74bn of free cash flow is not an accounting artefact; it is GPUs and buildings, paid for now against contracts that pay out later. The company is targeting more than 1.85 gigawatts of active power by year end. Every quarter this continues, the backlog has to keep converting at roughly the pace the capex assumes.
What the 14% pop says is that investors have decided backlog is the number that matters and cash burn is the cost of acquiring it. That is a defensible position while demand holds. It is also precisely the position that stops being defensible the first quarter a large contract slips, which is why the interesting metric next quarter is not revenue growth but the gap between committed backlog and delivered power.
CNBC — CoreWeave (CRWV) Q2 earnings report 2026 → · 24/7 Wall St. — CoreWeave Q2 2026: Revenue Doubles as Free Cash Flow Hits Negative $5.7 Billion → · Axios — CoreWeave surge bolsters the case for the AI trade →