CoreWeave secures Helios power, $40B

1/ CoreWeave’s latest Helios update is about a basic constraint in AI infrastructure: power. Galaxy Digital said on July 6 it completed Phase I at the Helios campus in West Texas, delivering about 200 megawatts of gross power, or 133 MW of critical IT load, to CoreWeave under a 15-year lease. (galaxy.com) 2/ The other number investors are focused on is demand. CoreWeave said in its first-quarter 2026 results that it booked more than $40 billion of new customer commitments in the quarter, lifting revenue backlog to nearly $100 billion. (investors.coreweave.com) 3/ Put together, those disclosures answer two separate questions around the company: whether customers are still signing up for large AI capacity blocks, and whether CoreWeave can actually get enough powered sites online to serve them. The Helios delivery speaks to the second issue; the backlog speaks to the first. (galaxy.com) 4/ Helios matters because it is not a small edge site. Galaxy has described the campus as a large West Texas data-center development, and said the Phase I handoff moved the project into revenue-generating operations. Rent commencement for Phase I began in the second quarter of 2026, according to Galaxy’s release and Yahoo Finance coverage. (galaxy.com) 5/ The lease structure predates this week’s delivery. Galaxy said in March 2025 that it had signed a 15-year lease with CoreWeave for 133 MW of critical IT load at Helios, and in April 2025 said an added commitment would bring total committed capacity at the site to 393 MW. (investor.galaxy.com) 6/ There is also a second build phase behind this. Galaxy has said greenfield development for a 260 MW Phase II build is underway, with initial data-hall deliveries expected in the first half of 2027. (investor.galaxy.com) 7/ Why does this land now? Because power access has become one of the gating items in AI data-center expansion. Bloomberg reported this week that the AI data-center boom is running into skilled-labor shortages, while Helios itself has needed financing, interconnection approvals and phased construction before capacity could be turned over. (galaxy.com) 8/ CoreWeave’s own numbers show how fast the company is trying to scale against that backdrop. In Q1 2026, it said active power had surpassed 1 gigawatt and contracted power exceeded 3.5 gigawatts, with most of the newly added capacity expected online by the end of 2027. (fool.com) 9/ That is why a 133 MW delivery gets attention. For a conventional cloud company, a single site update might read like project plumbing. For an AI cloud provider selling scarce GPU-backed capacity, a powered campus is part of the product. Without land, transmission access, equipment and labor lining up, backlog stays theoretical. This is an inference from the disclosed backlog and power figures. (galaxy.com) 10/ The market context is also unusually sensitive right now. Recent commentary cited by Yahoo Finance said investors have been watching the durability of AI-compute demand as Meta expands its cloud ambitions, and whether that changes the competitive picture for independent providers such as CoreWeave. (finance.yahoo.com) 11/ CoreWeave has been arguing demand remains strong. Its Q1 release called the period its strongest bookings quarter and said the company was funded for its next phase of expansion, while recent announcements included large agreements with Meta, Anthropic and Jane Street. (investors.coreweave.com) 12/ The near-term milestone to watch is Phase II at Helios. Galaxy has said the next tranche is progressing, with first deliveries due in H1 2027, while CoreWeave’s broader buildout is tied to bringing substantial additional contracted power online by the end of 2027. (rallies.ai)