CoreWeave reported third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 10, that answer the demand side of the argument about the AI buildout, even as they sharpen the questions about how that buildout gets paid for. Revenue reached 3.66 billion dollars, up 168 percent from a year earlier and ahead of analyst expectations, while the company's revenue backlog climbed to a record 132.5 billion dollars.
The backlog figure is the headline for enterprise IT buyers watching the neocloud market. It rose from 104 billion dollars at the end of the second quarter and was up 138 percent year over year, reflecting long-term contracts from AI labs, enterprises, and public-sector customers. CoreWeave said active power reached 1.7 gigawatts, doubling its active footprint since the end of 2025, and management said qualified demand through the end of 2027 is roughly ten times the capacity it has available.
Profitability at the operating level improved faster than the company had planned. Adjusted operating income was 379 million dollars, well above its guidance of 200 million to 260 million dollars, and adjusted EBITDA was 2.3 billion dollars, a 62 percent margin. On a GAAP basis, operating income was 207 million dollars. Management said the company reached a double-digit adjusted operating margin a quarter ahead of schedule, helped by operating leverage and a favorable pricing environment, including older Nvidia Ampere and Hopper systems recontracting at higher prices.
The other side of the ledger remains heavy. CoreWeave spent 14.5 billion dollars on capital expenditures in the quarter alone and guided full-year capital spending to 37 billion to 39 billion dollars. Interest expense was 846 million dollars in the quarter, and the company recorded a GAAP net loss of 709 million dollars, compared with a loss of 110 million dollars a year earlier. It finished the quarter with about 47 billion dollars of debt, and it expects fourth-quarter interest expense of 1.05 billion to 1.15 billion dollars.
Chief executive Michael Intrator used the call to explain how the company intends to fund the next stage without leaning on expensive unsecured borrowing. CoreWeave said it will not use the unsecured debt market at current yields and does not expect to need parent-level unsecured debt through 2027. Instead, it pointed to secured delayed-draw facilities tied to specific customer contracts, operating cash flow of 2 billion dollars in the quarter, and about 9 billion dollars in customer prepayments and deposits it expects to collect in the next three months. Its weighted average cost of debt fell to 7.9 percent, down 250 basis points year over year, and it said it has already paid down 4 billion dollars of principal.
CoreWeave also raised its outlook. It now expects 2026 revenue of 13.0 billion to 13.3 billion dollars, up from its previous forecast, and an exit annualized revenue run rate of 20 billion to 21 billion dollars. It said 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies are now customers, the number of customers committing more than 100 million dollars has risen two and a half times in a year, and it was the first cloud to bring Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems online for production workloads for Cognition.
For data center operators and cloud buyers, the results cut both ways. Contracted demand is clearly not slowing, and pricing for existing GPU capacity is rising rather than falling. At the same time, the scale of spending and borrowing required to convert that backlog into running capacity leaves CoreWeave, and the wider AI infrastructure trade, exposed to interest rates, power delivery, and the timing of customer deployments.