CoreWeave's $66.8B Backlog Boosts Long-Term Growth Outlook

CoreWeave CRWV recently reported strong fourth-quarter 2025 results, with revenue backlog reaching an impressive $66.8 billion. Backlog increased more than fourfold during 2025, reflecting strong customer commitments for its AI cloud infrastructure. These contracts provide insight into long-term demand and underpin the company’s rapid infrastructure expansion plans.

Growing demand for AI infrastructure is driving the record backlog, as management pointed out that clients are now increasingly deploying infrastructure tied to inference use cases. CoreWeave added that it is already signing reserved instance contracts for this infrastructure before this becomes available.

Longer contract duration is another key factor. Management underscored that the average weighted contract length has increased from four years to about five years, reflecting deeper customer commitments to its AI cloud platform. These commitments cover both current and previous GPU generations as part of larger customer roadmaps, with discussions already happening for future SKUs, added CRWV.

CoreWeave Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise

CoreWeave Inc. price-consensus-eps-surprise-chart | CoreWeave Inc. Quote

To support these long-term commitments, CoreWeave is rapidly expanding its infrastructure footprint. It ended 2025 with more than 850 megawatts of active power across 43 data centers, after adding 260 megawatts in the fourth quarter.  It also contracted nearly two gigawatts of additional power in 2025, bringing total contracted capacity to more than 3.1 gigawatts. Most of this capacity is expected to come online by 2027. Management stated that it aims to add more than five gigawatts of additional data center capacity by 2030.

For 2026, the company expects capital expenditures of $30 billion to $35 billion and plans to double active power capacity to more than 1.7 gigawatts. 
CoreWeave projects revenues to be between $12 billion and $13 billion for 2026, suggesting 140% year-over-year growth. Management expects every contract tied to new capacity to start generating revenues by the end of 2026.

However, intensifying competition in the AI space from the likes of pure plays like Nebius NBIS and bigwigs like Microsoft MSFT warrants caution.

Backlog Numbers for Competitors

Microsoft is one of the structurally dominant forces in the tech space. Azure is one of the biggest cloud platforms in the world. In the last reported quarter, commercial remaining performance obligation (“RPO”) stood at $625 billion, up 110% year over year, reflecting multiyear customer commitments across its cloud portfolio.

Microsoft added that about 25% of this RPO will be recognized in revenues in the next 12 months and the remaining will be recognized beyond that. A substantial portion of the RPO growth was driven by large Azure commitments from OpenAI and Anthropic, underscoring strong demand for Azure’s AI and cloud infrastructure.

Nebius is another hypergrowth AI infrastructure pureplay company. The company does not report backlog metrics like CoreWeave to highlight demand indicators. Instead, NBIS noted that the demand continues to exceed available capacity, with it selling out the compute capacity in the third and fourth quarters of 2025 and already sold out for the first quarter of 2026.

Like CRWV, NBIS is also witnessing increases in average contract duration. Average contract duration for new cloud customers increased 50%, suggesting longer-term engagements. The company accelerated its capacity plans, announcing nine new data centers and securing more than 2 gigawatts of contracted power, with expectations to exceed 3 gigawatts by 2026.  Nebius remains confident in its ability to generate an annualized run-rate revenue of between $7 billion and $9 billion by the end of 2026.

CRWV Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of CoreWeave have lost 22.7% over the past month compared with Internet Software industry’s decline of 0.8%.

In terms of Price/Book, CRWV’s shares are trading at 7.46X, way higher than the Internet Software industry’s ratio of 5.18X.  

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for CRWV’s earnings for 2026 has been unchanged over the past 60 days.

CRWV currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). 

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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