CoreWeave, Inc. Class A Common Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, and welcome to CoreWeave's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining the call today to discuss our results are Mike Intrator, CEO, and Nitin Agrawal, CFO. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements because of factors that are set forth in today's earnings press release, and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q to be filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures.

A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investors.coreweave.com. A replay of this call will also be available on our investor relations website. I'd like to turn the call over to Mike.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Q2 was an exceptional quarter for CoreWeave. We outperformed our plan across the board with the operating leverage we have been building beginning to show up clearly in our results. Extraordinary execution across the organization drove record financial performance, rapid capacity growth, broadening customer demand, and continued platform innovation. We generated record revenue of $2.6 billion, up 112% year-over-year, increased revenue backlog to $104 billion, while driving rapidly expanding enterprise adoption. This figure does not include the over $25 billion of net new customer commitments added in the early weeks of Q3. We continued to execute on our power strategy, reaching 1.5 gigawatts of active power, adding nearly 500 megawatts, more than any quarter in our history, and more than tripling year-over-year. We remain firmly on track to reach at least 8 gigawatts by 2030.

We grew adjusted operating income to $128 million, with margins expanding meaningfully as our scale increasingly translates into operating leverage. We continued to broaden our technology stack, delivering 7 new AI platform capabilities, and achieving multiple industry first milestones that enable customers to build, deploy, and operate AI faster and at greater scale. Our incredible progress is a testament to the entire organization, and the business is only getting stronger. In Q2, the customer contracts we signed came with contribution margins we expect to be 5 to 10 percentage points above those added in recent quarters. This is more than a collection of milestones. It is evidence that the AI market is developing in line with the convictions on which we built CoreWeave. We believe that the AI era is here and will ultimately touch every part of the global economy.

That every organization is being transformed, creating an opportunity to reinvent established markets and create entirely new ones. That the future will be led by the pioneers who seize that opportunity, both AI native companies at the frontier and change makers inside established enterprises. That learning and iterating at light speed are now table stakes for AI leadership. We believe those pioneers need a new kind of platform to unleash AI's potential at scale. These beliefs are the operating assumptions that drive our strategy. They guide our product roadmap, our capital allocation, our partnerships, and ultimately how we serve our customers. Today, I want to discuss how our vision is translating into 4 areas. One, broadening demand and customer adoption. Two, the continuous AI development tools we provide on our platform. Three, the performance and economics enabled by our AI native architecture.

Four, the power and supply chain foundation that will support years of growth. AI is transforming every organization. The debate around future demand for AI cloud infrastructure will likely continue. What we know with certainty is informed by our customers' actions. Demand continues to intensify as the market broadens across sectors, geographies, workloads, and generations of GPU architecture. AI is no longer confined to frontier model labs. It is becoming embedded in software, industrial systems, financial markets, enterprise workflows, and national security missions. We see that breadth in our backlog in the new commitments we have signed and in the utilization and pricing environment across our platform. Pricing and margins for our Blackwell and Vera Rubin SKUs are setting new highs, while pricing for prior generation SKUs is at or above where it was years ago. Our near-term capacity remains effectively sold out.

That is translating into signed commitments on increasingly favorable terms from a broadening set of customers and is positioning CoreWeave to gain market share for years to come. Every organization is being challenged to rethink what is possible. AI is not simply accelerating existing processes. It is enabling enterprises to redesign core functions, create new offerings, and enter markets that did not exist before. Caterpillar is a powerful example. Together, we will deploy NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform to support Caterpillar's physical AI training and inference at industrial scale. Using CoreWeave's AI cloud infrastructure as its data factory, Caterpillar will train specialized models that enhance the intelligence and productivity of autonomous construction equipment. Life sciences is emerging as another important growth vertical for CoreWeave. As organizations tackling some of the world's most complex scientific challenges increasingly turn to our platform.

We recently welcomed Isomorphic Labs as a new customer and are excited to support them in their mission to solve all disease. Financial services remains a major growth area for us as well. We recently added Flow Traders and IMC to our growing roster of systematic trading firms. These customers are using CoreWeave to develop and deploy the next generation of AI models for quantitative trading. They select our platform because of our ability to orchestrate high-performance workloads with the speed, reliability, and efficiency those applications require. In the public sector, our collaboration with Leidos marks an important step in the growth of CoreWeave Federal. Together, we are working to accelerate the delivery of secure AI capabilities for defense, national security, and intelligence missions. The future of AI is being built by a new class of innovators. Some are AI native companies operating at the frontier.

Others are change makers inside established enterprises who are willing to challenge the status quo. CoreWeave serves both. Companies such as Decart are using our platform to develop Oasis 3, the first API-accessible world model for physical AI. IBM is using CoreWeave to experiment securely with reinforcement learning, agent tool use, and model evaluation. Through Monolith, our specialist field engineers work directly alongside customers such as Nissan and ZF to accelerate the development of enterprise-ready AI applications. Demand now extends beyond our infrastructure as well. Through CoreWeave Omni, we are seeing significant interest from sovereign, enterprise, and cloud customers alike. In the past few weeks, we signed our first deal, which will begin to scale in 2027. These examples differ by industry and use case, but the pattern is consistent. AI is moving from experimentation into core operations, and the organizations that act decisively are creating an advantage.

Deployment is no longer the finish line. As AI moves into production, the way applications are built is changing, and the leaders will be those who learn and iterate the fastest. For the last several years, many organizations treated a model like a deliverable, train it, deploy it, and move on. Enterprises no longer operate that way. Training, inference, evaluation, and improvement now form a single continuous loop. Models and agents in production generate real-world data. That data informs evaluation, driving new experiments, which improve the model or application before being redeployed into production. The loop repeats and capability compounds over time. That shift fundamentally changes both the demand curve and the economics of AI. Compute is no longer a one-time requirement concentrated at the beginning of a model's life. It becomes an ongoing requirement that grows with every application in production and every cycle of improvement.

Our AI native platform was built for this. It spans cutting-edge cloud infrastructure, a rapidly growing managed inference business, leading developer tooling and agent solutions, and a best-in-class orchestration and observability layer powered by Mission Control. Together, these capabilities give customers one integrated environment. Customers deploy applications through CoreWeave inference using our models or the ones they have customized with our serverless capabilities. Monitor performance with Weights & Biases, evaluate applications in production, experiment with new models, refine their performance through serverless reinforcement learning or CoreWeave Sandboxes, and validate every change against quality, performance, and cost before returning it to production. CoreWeave ARIA, our AI research and iteration agent, accelerates that process further by analyzing thousands of evaluation runs, surfacing insights in minutes, and recommending the next experiment. That allows customers to compress the time between an idea, an experiment, and a production improvement at light speed.

In Q2, we introduced seven new AI platform capabilities and achieved multiple industry firsts. These innovations were built alongside our customers and partners to solve real production challenges. That is why we are seeing such strong adoption. Just this week, we surpassed 1 billion model training runs tracked on our platform. Behind that number are millions of experiments, thousands of research breakthroughs, and a growing community of engineers, researchers, and organizations building the next generation of AI. Our AI development services, which carry higher margins, are also being adopted by a broader set of customers than our core cloud. That is proving to be a natural customer expansion path, because the developers building AI applications today are the AI cloud infrastructure customers of tomorrow. By serving them early, we are establishing relationships that naturally expand as AI workloads scale.

We have seen an explosion of growth in our managed inference platform in the few months since its launch, with growth constrained only by our near-term capacity. Across serverless offerings and dedicated deployments, CoreWeave is monetizing tokens while giving customers flexibility in how they consume our platform. Companies such as Grammarly and you.com are moving from experimentation to real production traffic, running AI coding agents, serving their own fine-tuned models, and deploying open weight models at scale. Customers shouldn't have to trade speed for cost, and on CoreWeave, they don't. They choose our platform for the combination of total cost of ownership, quality, breadth of service, and performance. That is reflected in our consistent leadership across cost per token and speed to first token on leaderboards, like Artificial Analysis for open source models, including Kimi 2.6, Qwen 2.7 Code, GLM 5.2, and MiniMax M3.