There's a scene in Joker where Arthur Fleck dances on that staircase, thinking he's finally made it to the top. The whole world applauds. And then, two minutes later, reality comes crashing down on him.
CoreWeave is living that moment right now.
The numbers that should've been a party
The company dropped its Q4 2025 earnings and get this: revenue of $1.57 billion, beating the $1.55 billion consensus estimate. Growth of 110% year over year. CEO Mike Intrator, with the swagger of a guy who just took a victory lap, wrote on the company blog that CoreWeave had become "the fastest cloud platform in history to surpass $5 billion in annual revenue."
Cool, Mike. Congrats. Gold star.
But the market? The market sent shares down 8% in after-hours trading.
What the hell, why?
The devil's in the details — as always
First: the loss per share was 89 cents. That's not nothing. We're talking about a company that went public in March 2025 and has already racked up $21.37 billion in debt. Read that again? Twenty-one billion. With a "b" as in "burning a hole in your pocket."
Second: adjusted EBITDA of $898 million came in below the $929 million consensus. Seems like small potatoes, but when you're operating with tight margins and a mountain of debt, every penny counts.
Third: 2026 capex came in at $10.31 billion, below the $12.90 billion the market expected. That might sound good ("hey, they spent less!"), but for an infrastructure company that needs to scale aggressively, spending less can mean growing less. And that's where things get ugly.
The monster backlog — and what it actually means
Now, the number that makes any analyst's heart skip a beat: the revenue backlog jumped to $66.8 billion, up from $55.6 billion in Q3.
Sixty-seven billion in future contracts.
That's a massive line of customers mainlining GPUs — names like Google and OpenAI, who are basically the Tony Starks of artificial intelligence. CoreWeave also inked a deal with Poolside, launched an object storage service, and bumped its credit facility from $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion.
Active power capacity? 850 megawatts, above the 827 MW expected. Contracted capacity? 3.1 gigawatts. That's a lot of power. A lot of machines running. A lot of cash burning.
And that's exactly where the paradox lives.
The curse of "grow at any cost"
You know what CoreWeave reminds me of? Walter White's expansion phase in Breaking Bad. The guy had the best product on the market, infinite demand, but the operation got so big and so leveraged that any stumble turned into an existential crisis.
CoreWeave is that. It's, without question, one of the best-positioned companies in the AI boom. While the software ETF dropped nearly 22% in 2026, CoreWeave's stock climbed 36% through Thursday's close. But sustaining that pace with $21 billion in debt is like running a marathon with a piano strapped to your back.
And the timing is brutal. Anthropic dropped some recent announcements that sent software investors selling everything in sight. Sector sentiment is jittery. Nobody wants to be the last one out of the party if the music stops.
What actually matters here
CoreWeave isn't a fraud. It's not a meme. It's a real company, with real contracts, with clients that are the biggest names on the planet in AI. But the market is saying something Mike Intrator might not want to hear: growing 110% a year isn't enough if you can't show a clear path to profitability.
Nassim Taleb would say CoreWeave's fragility lies in the size of its leverage. If AI demand stumbles — and nobody knows when, but it can stumble — those $21 billion in debt become an anchor around its neck.
The question that remains: are you comfortable betting on a company that doubles revenue every year, but needs every last cent of a $67 billion backlog to materialize just to avoid imploding?
Because the market, tonight, answered that it's not all that comfortable.
And the market, when it gets uncomfortable, doesn't send you a heads-up letter. It sends a haymaker.
