CoreWeave nears $50B backlog

CoreWeave said on May 7 that its revenue backlog reached $99.4 billion at the end of the first quarter, up from $60.7 billion at the end of 2025, as demand for AI cloud capacity accelerated. Nebius Group said on May 13 that its AI cloud revenue rose 841% year over year to $390 million in the quarter, and that it had raised its 2026 contracted power guidance to 4 gigawatts. The updates, released days apart, offered one of the clearest snapshots yet of how quickly demand for AI data-center capacity is expanding beyond chipmakers and into the cloud providers building and financing the infrastructure. Nvidia remains central to that buildout, with CoreWeave highlighting Blackwell deployments and Nebius citing a deeper partnership backed by a January equity investment from Nvidia. ### How big is CoreWeave’s contracted business now? CoreWeave reported $99.4 billion of revenue backlog as of March 31, 2026, in its first-quarter earnings release. Chief Executive Michael Intrator called it “the strongest bookings quarter in CoreWeave’s history” and said the company had surpassed 1 gigawatt of active power. CoreWeave also said total contracted power rose by more than 400 megawatts in the quarter to more than 3.5 gigawatts. (investors.coreweave.com) March was a key month in that increase. CoreWeave said it executed multiple new agreements with Meta, including a new $21 billion commitment signed in March, and Meta and CoreWeave later said publicly on April 9 that the expanded agreement runs through December 2032. The companies said the capacity will be deployed across multiple locations and will include some of the initial deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. (investors.coreweave.com) ### What did Nebius report this week? Nebius said on May 13 that its AI cloud revenue increased 841% from a year earlier and 82% from the prior quarter to $390 million. In the same shareholder letter, the company said it remained on track for $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion of 2026 revenue and $7 billion to $9 billion of annualized run-rate revenue. (investors.coreweave.com) The company also said it had secured $6.3 billion of capital in the quarter, including convertible notes and an equity investment from Nvidia, and ended the quarter with $9.3 billion of cash. Nebius said it had secured up to 1.2 gigawatts of power and land for a new owned AI factory in Pennsylvania and more than 300 megawatts at a site in Finland. (assets.nebius.com) ### Where does Nvidia fit in this buildout? Nvidia said in April 2025 that CoreWeave had become one of the first cloud providers to bring Nvidia GB200 NVL72 systems online for customers at scale. Nvidia said customers including Cohere, IBM and Mistral AI were already using those systems to train and deploy models, and CoreWeave said thousands of Blackwell GPUs were being made available. (assets.nebius.com) Nebius also tied its latest expansion plans to Nvidia’s ecosystem. In its May 13 shareholder letter, Nebius said a deeper partnership with Nvidia was helping power inference and agentic AI, and it cited a $2 billion investment. CoreWeave’s investor materials separately say backlog is weighted to the next two to four years, a timeline that shows how quickly providers are trying to convert signed contracts into live capacity. (blogs.nvidia.com) ### What risks are building alongside the growth? CoreWeave’s first-quarter figures showed the scale of the financing burden alongside the demand surge. The company reported $2.078 billion in revenue, $536 million in net interest expense and a net loss of $740 million for the quarter. Those figures illustrate how much debt and infrastructure spending sit behind the contract growth. (assets.nebius.com) Customer concentration also remains a live issue for AI cloud providers. CoreWeave said in its first-quarter release that Meta accounted for a new $21 billion commitment, while its recent filings and investor disclosures have highlighted dependence on a small number of very large customers. Nebius, for its part, is funding a rapid capacity buildout while targeting as much as 4 gigawatts of contracted power by the end of 2026. (investors.coreweave.com) ### What comes next for these companies? May 13 and May 7 marked the latest formal updates from Nebius and CoreWeave, and both companies have near-term investor events scheduled. Nebius’ investor hub lists a June 9 event in San Francisco, while CoreWeave has said it will participate in the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference after its first-quarter release. Those appearances will give investors the next public read on bookings, capacity additions and customer demand. (investors.coreweave.com) (nebius.com)