CoreWeave Has $132.5B Backlog and $41.6B of Debt

By Rebecca Stone

CoreWeave carries $41.6 billion in corporate debt while saying qualified demand reaches 10 times available capacity through year-end 2027. Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh offered a more reassuring funding message: “prepayments on Q3 agreements covered more than 100% of the associated capex.”

NASDAQ-listed CoreWeave (CRWV) and Nebius (NBIS) reported third-quarter results two days apart. CoreWeave posted Q3 revenue of $3.66 billion, up 168.3%, while Nebius generated $980.8 million, up 571.3%. Both said AI-compute demand exceeded the capacity they could bring online.

How do the third-quarter numbers compare?

• Q3 net loss: CoreWeave, $709 million; Nebius, $37.5 million.
• Cash: CoreWeave, $4.12 billion; Nebius, $7.43 billion.
• 2026 capital-expenditure guidance: CoreWeave, $37 billion to $39 billion; Nebius, about $27 billion.
• Demand signal: CoreWeave, about $132.5 billion of backlog; Nebius, more than $12 billion signed since Q3 began.

CoreWeave raised prices approximately 25% in July and another 10% later in the quarter. Its adjusted operating margin reached 10%, a quarter ahead of plan, but $846 million of net interest expense helped drive a $709 million GAAP net loss.

Nebius generated about $325 million from a non-recurring, asset-light deal, which made its headline larger than its recurring business. Colocation delays in New Jersey pushed 2026 revenue to the low end of the company’s $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion range.

Prices rose more than 20% per GPU-hour from Q2, and Databricks, Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) and Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) signed multi-year contracts.

Can customer prepayments replace bond funding?

CoreWeave’s CFO told analysts: “we will not use the unsecured debt market to fund our business at current yields, nor do we need to.” Management expects less than $5 billion of parent-level capital through 2027 and another approximately $9 billion of prepayments and deposits during the next three months.

The financing mix helps. So does Nebius’s balance sheet. Yet CoreWeave’s 8.94 debt-to-equity ratio leaves shareholders with a thin buffer. Nebius reported negative $273 million of operating cash flow and added $5.75 billion in convertible notes.

Dilution is a risk for both. CoreWeave’s at-the-market (ATM) program covers up to 35 million shares.

What must each company deliver in 2027?

More than 130,000 CoreWeave GPUs come off contract in 2027. Management says renewals could add approaching $4 billion of annualized revenue without new capital spending, although it guides Q4 interest expense to $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion.

For Nebius, the test rests on company-owned sites in Missouri, Alabama and Finland, which management targets for $12 billion to $13 billion of 2027 revenue and pre-tax breakeven in Q4 2027.

Investors took a harsher view of Nebius on Thursday. Its shares fell 16.84% to $128.64, while CoreWeave declined 6.86%.

That reaction centers on timing rather than funding durability. Nebius holds $7.43 billion of cash and $12.30 billion of shareholders’ equity, alongside a much smaller $37.5 million quarterly loss. CoreWeave has the larger backlog, but interest costs absorb much of its operating profit.

If renewals arrive and interest expense stops rising, CoreWeave’s balance-sheet risk eases. Until then, CoreWeave carries greater leverage and Nebius has the stronger funding position against the same demand.

Both companies sit at the chip layer of the AI buildout; power, thermal and connectivity suppliers form a separate downstream infrastructure trade. By the end of 2027, CoreWeave’s 130,000-plus GPU renewals and interest bill will test its pricing power, while Nebius’s Missouri, Alabama and Finland ramps will show whether cleaner funding can turn constrained capacity into revenue.