Nov 11 (Reuters) - CoreWeave jumped 10% on Wednesday, igniting a rally in battered AI cloud stocks, as its hefty spending yielded strong revenue growth and the company signaled a pullback from the borrowing binge that had set off alarms of an AI bubble.
The earnings also lifted shares of key CoreWeave backer Nvidia by 5%, after a bruising two-day slide driven by worries about CEO Jensen Huang's future at the company following his affair with a Chinese businesswoman alleged to be a spy for Beijing.
Shares of so-called "neoclouds" including Nebius and Iren rallied after facing weeks of turmoil on fears that their debt-fueled data center expansion could backfire if AI demand slows.
The Democratic midterm sweep last week dealt another blow to the industry, with several winning candidates campaigning for tighter regulation and moratoriums on new data center construction, including in the crucial market of Texas.
CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator told Reuters on Tuesday that greater scrutiny could slow data center construction across the industry, but he did not expect it to significantly alter the company's expansion plans or drive up costs.
The company also raised its annual revenue forecast and said it would not tap unsecured debt markets after a recent spike in borrowing costs and that cash flow from existing contracts would cover both current and future debt repayments.
"CoreWeave delivered about the best quarter we could have asked for. Stats were good-to-great, funding concerns were addressed and the strategic moves make sense," Bernstein analysts led by Madison Rezaei said in a client note.
But they warned that CoreWeave "will be among the first and hardest hit" when the crunch in AI computing capacity eases.
The risks of mistiming AI investments became evident on Tuesday as SoftBank took a $3.7 billion writedown on non-refundable payments for equipment to power its US data centers.
That pushed the Japanese tech investor to a second-quarter net loss of $7 billion, its first in nearly two years.
For now, CoreWeave's results gave investors in AI infrastructure stocks reason to cheer, with Nebius, Iren, Oracle and Applied Digital climbing between 4.7% and 11.8% in premarket trading.
All the stocks but Nebius have lost 32% to 48% this year as of Tuesday, while Nebius has surged 60%.
Together, the cloud companies, including CoreWeave, were set to gain more than $25 billion in market value on the day, while Nvidia alone stood to add about $210 billion, if gains hold.
Nebius is due to report results before Thursday's opening bell.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
