CoreWeave Revenue Rose 112%, Its Depreciation Rose 149%

Why It Matters

CoreWeave sells time on graphics processors bought with borrowed money, so revenue is never the interesting number. Revenue landed at $2.575 billion against the $2.56 billion LSEG consensus CNBC published. Depreciation decides whether that revenue becomes profit, and it grew 148.7% while revenue grew 112.5%. Revenue rose $1.363 billion and depreciation rose $833 million, so 61 cents of every new revenue dollar arrived already spoken for. Interest took another $640 million, five times the adjusted operating income the same statement reports.

That gap is why one release supports two opposite headlines. Adjusted EBITDA, which adds depreciation back, roughly doubled to $1.510 billion from $753 million. Adjusted operating income, which does not, fell 36% to $128 million from $200 million. GAAP operating income crossed from a $19 million profit into a $49 million loss. Chief executive Michael Intrator said scale “began to translate into expanding operating leverage,” and the release carries the evidence for that and against it on adjacent lines.

The tape needed two hours to choose. CNBC first reported shares down about 6%, then updated its own headline to a 12% gain. At 4:54 PM Eastern, StockAnalysis showed $100.89 against a $90.32 close. The Market Context reported on June 19 that CoreWeave raised $3.5 billion in dollar and euro senior notes.

The backlog grew more in three weeks of July than in all of the second quarter

Every headline carried the $104 billion backlog, and almost none carried the sentence sitting underneath it. That $104 billion “does not include more than $25 billion of net new customer commitments added in early Q3,” the footnote says. So the number CoreWeave was willing to certify as of June 30 was already stale when it printed.

Blockspace reported the comparison the release itself leaves out, putting the backlog at $99.4 billion when the first quarter ended. So CoreWeave added $4.6 billion of committed future revenue across three months of the second quarter, and more than $25 billion in the first weeks of the third. The later figure is 5.4 times the earlier one, compressed into roughly a sixth of the time.

Read as a clock, $104 billion is 40 quarters of revenue at the rate the company just reported, a little over ten years. Counting the footnote takes it past $129 billion, or about 12.5 years. The delivery constraint is power, and the release gives both halves of it: active power expanded by nearly 500 megawatts to 1.5 gigawatts, while total contracted power reached roughly 3.7 gigawatts. Fifty-nine percent of the electricity CoreWeave has contracted for is not yet running anything.

Six of twelve lines in the release grew faster than revenue, and every one of them is a machine cost

Rank every line in the release by year-over-year growth and the sort does the arguing. Four cost lines grew faster than revenue’s 112.5%, and each of them is a machine cost. The lines that grew slower are the ones that carry people and selling effort. The net loss widened to $626 million from $290 million, a gain of 115.9% that also outpaces revenue.

The consequence shows up as share of the top line. Depreciation took 46.2% of revenue a year ago and takes 54.1% now. Net interest took 22.0% and takes 24.9%. Together those two lines consumed 79 cents of every revenue dollar in the quarter, before a single engineer or salesperson was paid.

The capital behind that is visible on the cash flow statement. CoreWeave spent $6.422 billion on property and equipment in three months against $2.575 billion of revenue, which is $2.49 of hardware purchased per dollar of revenue recognised. Operating cash flow of $679 million against that spending leaves roughly $5.7 billion of negative free cash flow. Financing activities supplied $10.071 billion, comfortably more than the gap. Property and equipment on the balance sheet now stands at $46.736 billion inside $77.070 billion of total assets, funded against $5.024 billion of stockholders equity. Blockspace put the debt at $31.405 billion recourse and $3.663 billion non-recourse. Intel announced a $15 billion equity sale on August 10, and the two are the same trade seen from different ends of the supply chain.

The operating leverage the company claims is real, and it lives in the lines that carry people

Six lines grew slower than revenue, and the slowest is the most revealing. General and administrative expense rose 2.3%, from $174 million to $178 million, while revenue more than doubled. As a share of revenue it fell from 14.4% to 6.9%. Sales and marketing rose 66.7% in dollars and fell from 3.0% of revenue to 2.3%. Those are textbook operating leverage, and they are exactly the costs a cloud business is supposed to spread as it scales.

The sequential comparison tells the same story on the profit line. The release gives six-month adjusted operating income of $149 million against $128 million in the second quarter, which puts the first quarter at $21 million. Second quarter adjusted operating income is therefore 6.1 times the first quarter’s, and the margin moved from 1% to 5%. Measured against three months ago, the inflection Intrator described is on the page. Measured against a year ago, the same line fell 36%. Both comparisons are honest, and depreciation is the only reason they disagree.

Cash collection improved too. Operating cash flow swung to $679 million from negative $251 million a year earlier, and across six months to $3.663 billion from negative $190 million. The release names Bentley Systems, Caterpillar, Grammarly, Isomorphic Labs and Sunday Robotics as new customers, which is a different roster from the AI laboratories that built the early book. Riot Platforms signed a $9.1 billion data centre lease this week, and CoreWeave sits one rung up the same stack, renting the buildings and selling the compute inside them.

What to watch

1. The Q2 2026 Form 10-Q, due within roughly forty days of the June 30 quarter end. Read the property and equipment note for the useful lives assigned to computing hardware. That assumption sets the $1.393 billion depreciation figure, and any change to it moves the operating line directly.

2. The third quarter results release, expected in early November. The backlog line is the one to read. It must either absorb the footnoted $25 billion or account for its absence.

3. The same release’s adjusted operating income line against this quarter’s $128 million. The first quarter printed $21 million and the second printed $128 million. A third consecutive increase would establish a sequence, and a flat figure would mark $128 million as this cycle’s peak.

4. Tonight’s earnings call at 5:00 PM Eastern and the transcript that follows it. The release itself contains no forward guidance and says so, deferring every number to the call, so the full-year revenue and adjusted operating income ranges exist only in that recording.