Aug 11 (Reuters) - CoreWeave lifted its annual capital spending forecast on Tuesday after beating second-quarter estimates, encouraged by a surge in demand for its AI cloud computing services, sending the company's shares more than 14% higher in extended trading.
The AI cloud company also lifted its targets for 2026 revenue and adjusted profit, banking on a ballooning order book, after its revenue backlog topped $100 billion in the June quarter.
CoreWeave now expects full-year capital expenditure to
be between $35 billion and $39 billion, up from its previous expectations of $31 billion to $35 billion.
So-called neoclouds such as CoreWeave and peer Nebius, which offer hardware and cloud capacity to other technology companies, have seen demand skyrocket as a result of relentless enterprise spending on AI.
CoreWeave's close ties with Nvidia have cemented its position as a key provider of compute capacity powered by advanced Nvidia chips, which helped it draw high-profile customers such as Meta, Claude creator Anthropic and Caterpiller, among others.
The company reported revenue backlog of $104.2 billion as of June 30, up from $99.4 billion at the end of the first quarter. CoreWeave said it also secured more than $25 billion of net new customer commitments in the current quarter.
"We outperformed our plan across the board, with the operating leverage we have been building beginning to show up clearly in our results," co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator said on a post-earnings call.
The company's near-term capacity was effectively sold out, translating into compute capacity agreements on "increasingly favorable terms" from a growing set of customers, Intrator added.
Total revenue more than doubled to $2.58 billion in the second quarter ended June, compared with analysts' average estimate of $2.56 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
On an adjusted basis, it posted a per-share loss of $1.03, compared with market expectations for a loss of $1.20.
Its capital expenditures reached $9.4 billion in the June quarter, compared with $6.8 billion in the prior three-month period and the $2.9 billion reported a year earlier.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
