Coreweave surges 18% in premarket after a 'cleaner quarter'. Here's what's happening

AI cloud giant CoreWeave was up in premarket trading on Wednesday after reporting that its second-quarter revenue doubled, driven by surging demand from hyperscalers for AI compute capacity.

The company, which rents out high-powered computing capacity needed to run and build AI, reported after the bell Tuesday that its second-quarter revenue came in at $2.6 billion, up 112% from $1.2 billion in the second quarter of 2025. It's guiding for third-quarter revenue of between $3.4 billion and $3.6 billion.

But the company is still not profitable. Operating expenses for the quarter also more than doubled year-on-year and marginally exceeded revenue, per the results. CoreWeave was last seen up 18% in premarket trading. At Tuesday's close, it was up 26% since the start of the year.

Coreweave's stock since the beginning of the year.

Its revenue backlog for the quarter stands at $104 billion as of June 30, which doesn't include $25 billion in new customer commitments for the third quarter.

"CoreWeave reached an important inflection point this quarter as our scale began to translate into expanding operating leverage," CoreWeave's CEO Michael Intrator said in the release. "Customer demand is accelerating, as enterprise adoption broadens and we continue to deepen our technology platform."

Intrator is appearing on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" at 9 am ET on Wednesday.

CoreWeave has taken on significant debt as it races to build AI infrastructure.

Operating expenses rose to $2.6 billion from $1.2 billion a year earlier. That left CoreWeave with an operating loss of $49 million, compared with operating income of $19 million a year earlier.

For the full year, the company forecasts revenue of $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion and adjusted operating income of $960 million to $1.15 billion.

Some of its second-quarter highlights include winning customers such as Bentley Systems, Grammarly, Isomorphic Labs, and Sunday Robotics.

It also deepened major commercial partnerships with Jane Street, committing $1 billion in strategic investments, while Meta said it would spend an additional $21 billion with CoreWeave during the quarter.

Citi analysts said in a note Wednesday that CoreWeave "delivered a confident message" in the second quarter as it demonstrated that AI demand was robust, had stronger pricing power, saw growing demand for its software and tokens business, and better-than-expected margins.

They added it was "one of the cleaner quarters" for CoreWeave since it went public last year. "We think shares should move meaningfully higher on increased investor confidence in the execution and improving profitability," the analysts continued.

They pointed to upward revisions to profitability guidance and positive updates on execution and customer and revenue diversification.

The analysts said those developments were positive signs for demand across the hyperscaler and neo-cloud space.

Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.