A landmark $14.2 billion agreement with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) recently sent shares of CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) up nearly 12%, crystallizing the company’s crucial role in the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The market’s excitement reflects a growing understanding of a classic investment strategy: During a gold rush, some of the most durable profits are made not by the prospectors finding the gold, but by those selling the picks and shovels.
In the current AI revolution, NVIDIA is the undisputed leader in the industry’s shovels, thanks to its world-leading Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This has positioned CoreWeave as a premier builder of the mines: the massive, power-intensive, and highly specialized data centers where those GPUs are put to work. For investors, this dynamic presents a clear thesis for investing in the essential infrastructure that underpins the entire AI ecosystem.
Why AI Giants Are Choosing CoreWeave
The reason CoreWeave is winning these mega-deals lies in a distinct technological advantage that forms a powerful competitive moat. Unlike traditional cloud providers, whose networks were designed for a wide variety of tasks using standard Ethernet, CoreWeave’s infrastructure was purpose-built for the unique demands of AI. Its key differentiator is the use of high-performance networking, specifically NVIDIA's Quantum-2 InfiniBand technology.
This advanced architecture allows thousands of individual GPUs to be interconnected with extremely high bandwidth and low latency, enabling them to function as a single, cohesive supercomputer. For AI labs training massive, complex models, this technical superiority translates directly into a compelling economic benefit. It can reduce model training times from weeks to days, providing a game-changing advantage in the race to develop the next generation of AI. This performance moat is the fundamental reason why the world’s most sophisticated AI developers are increasingly entrusting their most critical and demanding workloads to CoreWeave's platform.
Unprecedented Demand: A Kingdom Built on Contracts
CoreWeave’s recent commercial momentum demonstrates its accelerating market leadership. The month of September alone has served as a powerful validation from the industry's most important players, with a rapid succession of blockbuster announcements that showcase the demand for the company’s services:
- Meta Platforms: A new multi-year agreement to provide up to $14.2 billion in AI compute capacity, securing a foundational role in powering one of the world's largest technology platforms.
- OpenAI: An expanded partnership adding up to $6.5 billion in contract value, bringing the total potential commitment from the pioneering AI lab to approximately $22.4 billion.
- NVIDIA: A strategic $6.3 billion capacity agreement, in which NVIDIA commits to purchasing CoreWeave's unsold capacity, effectively de-risking the company’s massive expansion plans.
These new contracts will add tens of billions of dollars to a revenue backlog that already stood at an impressive $30.1 billion, based on Coreweave’s second-quarter 2025 earnings report. This provides the company with extraordinary long-term revenue visibility that justifies its aggressive investments in growth. This momentum is reflected in the company’s top-line performance, with Q2 revenue growing an explosive 207% year-over-year to $1.21 billion.
Justifying the Premium: Growth vs. Valuation
With a market capitalization soaring past $66 billion and a stock price that has climbed over 240% year-to-date, CoreWeave clearly trades at a premium. The central question for investors is whether this valuation is justified.
From a growth investor's perspective, the market is pricing the stock not on past performance but on its future potential to dominate a rapidly expanding, multi-trillion-dollar market. While the company continues to report GAAP net losses ($290.5 million in Q2), these figures are driven by heavy but necessary investments in new infrastructure.
A look at the company's non-GAAP metrics reveals the powerful cash-generating potential of its core business. In the second quarter, CoreWeave generated $753 million in Adjusted EBITDA on a healthy 62% margin. This demonstrates that the company's aggressive growth, funded by successful capital raises like the $3.75 billion in senior notes issued in mid-2025, is being built upon a highly profitable operational foundation.
Why CoreWeave’s Reign Is Just Beginning
CoreWeave’s technological moat, now validated by a trifecta of mega-deals with the world's top AI companies, provides a strong foundation for sustained growth. While the stock has experienced volatility following the expiration of its IPO lock-up period in mid-August, much of the resulting insider selling was executed under pre-scheduled Rule 10b5-1 trading plans that key executives established months prior. This context suggests the sales are part of planned financial diversification rather than a sudden reaction to current business conditions, and with the lock-up period now fully expired, a key source of market uncertainty has been eliminated.
The next significant step in the company's infrastructure-first strategy is the pending acquisition of Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), which continues to advance toward an expected close in late 2025. While the deal faces some shareholder opposition (primarily a valuation-based dispute, a common hurdle in large mergers), its long-term industrial logic remains compelling. As the market digests these technical factors, long-term investors should focus on the company's execution. Key metrics to watch in upcoming reports include:
- Execution: Continued progress on hitting data center go-live dates and achieving the target of over 900 megawatts of active power by year-end.
- Profitability: Improvement in operating margins as the company scales and begins to realize cost savings.
- Demand: Continued growth in the revenue backlog from new and existing customers.
While the stock navigates post-lock-up market dynamics, the underlying business has been fundamentally strengthened. This landmark agreement with NVIDIA, coupled with the massive contracts from Meta and OpenAI, builds a competitive moat that will be difficult for rivals to overcome, cementing CoreWeave's position for years to come.
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The article "CoreWeave: Why the New King of AI Infrastructure Has Room to Run" first appeared on MarketBeat.