CoreWeave backlog hits $99.4 billion

CoreWeave said on May 7 that its revenue backlog reached $99.4 billion as of March 31, 2026, giving investors one of the clearest measures yet of how much future AI infrastructure demand has already been contracted. The figure came in the company’s first-quarter earnings release, where CoreWeave said the backlog was up 284% from a year earlier. The company tied that growth to a wave of customer wins across AI labs, hyperscalers and enterprises, including Meta and Anthropic. It also listed Perplexity among customers and said it had expanded relationships with Cohere, Jane Street and Mistral. ### What does “backlog” mean here? CoreWeave defined the number as “revenue backlog,” not current-quarter sales. In practical terms, that means contracted revenue the company expects to recognize over time as it delivers cloud infrastructure and related services. CoreWeave reported first-quarter revenue of $2.078 billion, so the backlog is many times larger than its quarterly sales base. (investors.coreweave.com) The March 31 date matters. The $99.4 billion figure was not a May 20 operating update; it was disclosed in the company’s May 7 earnings release for the quarter ended March 31, 2026. Social posts this week highlighted the number again, but the underlying disclosure came earlier in the month. ### Which customers were behind the jump? (investors.coreweave.com) Meta was one of the biggest named contributors. CoreWeave said it executed multiple new agreements with Meta, including a new $21 billion commitment signed in March. That followed earlier Meta business with the company and added to a growing list of large, long-duration contracts for AI compute. (investors.coreweave.com) Anthropic was another named driver. CoreWeave said it signed a multi-year agreement with Anthropic to support development and deployment of the Claude family of AI models. On its newsroom page, CoreWeave separately described Anthropic’s deal as a multi-year agreement and said Meta would use its cloud platform to scale inference workloads. (investors.coreweave.com) Perplexity was named as a customer, but not in the same way as Meta or Anthropic. CoreWeave’s earnings release listed Perplexity among “leading AI pioneers and enterprises,” while the release separately identified expanded relationships with Cohere, Jane Street and Mistral. The May 7 filing excerpt visible in search results does not name Microsoft or OpenAI in the customer-win section tied to the quarter’s backlog growth, even though both have been associated with CoreWeave in prior coverage. (investors.coreweave.com) ### Why are investors focused on this number? A 284% increase in backlog points to demand arriving faster than CoreWeave can recognize it as revenue. Chief Executive Michael Intrator said the quarter was the “strongest bookings quarter” in the company’s history and said backlog reached “nearly $100 billion.” He also said CoreWeave had surpassed 1 gigawatt of active power and believed it was on track for more than 8 gigawatts by 2030. (investors.coreweave.com) The same earnings report showed why the backlog number is being weighed against execution risk. CoreWeave posted a net loss of $740 million in the quarter, interest expense of $536 million and operating expenses of $2.222 billion, even as revenue more than doubled from a year earlier. CNBC reported the company maintained full-year revenue guidance of $12 billion to $13 billion and projected second-quarter revenue below analyst expectations. (investors.coreweave.com) ### What can actually be verified about Microsoft and OpenAI? CoreWeave’s own first-quarter release, as surfaced in investor materials, directly names Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, Cohere, Jane Street and Mistral in connection with recent customer activity. It does not, in the visible text of that filing excerpt, say that Microsoft or OpenAI were part of the specific first-quarter backlog increase. (investors.coreweave.com) Earlier reporting and company-related coverage have linked Microsoft and OpenAI to CoreWeave as customers. Data Center Dynamics reported in September 2025 that Meta joined Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI as customers of the AI cloud provider. But for this specific $99.4 billion backlog disclosure, the directly verified primary-source names are Meta, Anthropic and Perplexity, along with other customers listed in the earnings release. (investors.coreweave.com) ### What comes next? CoreWeave said it would discuss first-quarter results and forward guidance on its investor webcast on May 7, and future updates are likely to come through earnings releases, SEC filings and contract announcements on its investor relations and newsroom pages. Those are the documents that currently anchor the $99.4 billion backlog figure and the named-customer disclosures tied to it. (last10k.com) (datacenterdynamics.com)