CoreWeave has posted its second-ever earnings results since the company's IPO earlier this year, revealing a revenue that has broken the $1 billion ceiling and a significantly spiky capex plan for the year.

Q2 2025 saw a revenue of $1.2bn, up 207 percent year over year (YoY) and an increase on the previous quarter's $971.63m. Meanwhile, the company has raised its full-year revenue guidance to $5.15-$5.35bn, up from $4.9-$5.1bn.

The company now has a revenue backlog of $30.1bn, which has grown 86 percent YoY, and is up more than $4bn from the previous quarter alone. According to CoreWeave, this has been driven by the OpenAI deal and subsequent $4bn expansion in H1 of 2025, as well as an unnamed hyperscaler signing a large contract in the quarter.

While the hyperscaler remained anonymous, previous reports have suggested that Google would be leasing capacity from CoreWeave for its own OpenAI deal.

The company has also signed contracts with BT Group, Cohere, Hippocratic AI, Hologen, LG CNS, Mistral, Moonvalley, Novel, and Woven by Toyota in the quarter.

Interestingly, the company noted that it has seen an increase in demand for inference in the quarter.

CEO Michael Intrator told analysts: "We have seen a massive increase in our workloads that are being used for inference, and we’re able to monitor that by the profile that the power is being consumed within the data centers.

"So when you have big training runs that come on and off, that’s a step function of power consumption, either up or down, as opposed to when you are using your compute for inference, which is much more incremental in its nature.

According to Intrator, the economics for inference consumption and training consumption are identical. He added: "The overwhelming majority of our infrastructure has been sold in long-term structured contracts in order to be able to deliver compute to our clients that need to consume it for training and for inference over time. And so we don’t see a real fluctuation in the economics associated with inference or training."

Despite this, he notes that he expects, when new AI models are released, there could be a spike in short-term pricing for inference, but the on-demand compute is a very small percentage of CoreWeave's workloads.

While revenue continues to grow, so do the company's capital expenditures.

Capex for the quarter was $2.9bn, the highest in the company's history and significantly more than Q1's $1.9bn - though that was somewhat an anomaly, with capex in the previous three quarters all exceeding $2bn.

Speaking on capex, CFO Nitin Agrawal noted that the company is "executing at a massive scale and the demand continues to outpace supply," adding that timing is not always consistent with data center capacity coming online and the deployment of GPUs, meaning there can be "significant variation" quarter to quarter in terms of capex.

The company has maintained a predicted capex of $20bn-$23bn for the full year, with Q3 to see between $2.9bn and $3.4bn.

Agrawal said that "a significant portion of our full-year capex will fall in Q4 due to the timing of go-live dates of our infrastructure." If the higher end of the Q3 capex estimate is fulfilled, this would see a Q4 capex of at least $11.8bn and possibly as much as $14.8bn - significantly more than the three previous quarters combined.

Intrator explained that this was due to the company's goal of bringing another 400MW or more online this year, and once that power is available, spending on hardware will ramp up. Agrawal added that the company has been "operationally preparing" for this ramp-up.

As of Q2 2024, CoreWeave now has 33 data centers live with 470MW of active power. The company also has 2.2GW of contracted power, adding 600MW in the quarter.

Major data center announcements from the quarter include CoreWeave's acquisition of the NEST data center in New Jersey, and plans for a $6bn data center in Pennsylvania.

Despite this, the company remains capacity-constrained - a shared experience with other cloud hyperscalers. Speaking on this, CEO Intrator said that it is the "powered shells that are the choke point, that is causing the struggle to get enough infrastructure online for the demand signals that we are seeing," adding that power on a grid level is also a problem, and the supply chains that existing within GPUs and other hardware are constrained.

A major announcement from the quarter was CoreWeave's planned acquisition of data center provider Core Scientific for $9bn. This was, understandably, referenced during the earnings call, with Intrator telling analysts: "Both the CoreWeave and Core Scientific management teams and boards have evaluated this transaction extensively and concluded this is the best for both companies and their shareholders."

He goes on to explain that, for CoreWeave, owning its infrastructure will enable the company to scale faster and will give the company 1.3GW of gross power capacity, and is hoped to give the company $500m in annual run rate cost savings by 2027, which will benefit "both the Core Scientific and CoreWeave shareholders directly.

"We and Core Scientific look forward to discussing the transaction with you in the months ahead. Our respective teams are already engaged in pre-integration planning to ensure we’re ready to hit the ground running."

Unmentioned was the revelation from earlier this month that Core Scientific's largest shareholder intends to oppose the acquisition, arguing that it undervalues Core Scientific. CoreWeave previously declined to comment on this to DCD.

Behind the scenes of all of this, CoreWeave has been continuing to raise funding.

Since the beginning of 2024, CoreWeave has raised more than $25bn in debt and equity to fund the build-out of its platform, and since the company's IPO has conducted two high-yield bond raises - one for $2bn and another for $1.75bn, and in July closed $2.6bn in secured debt financing that completed the necessary funding for its contract with OpenAI.

The bond raises have, at least in part, been used to refinance debt at a better interest rate for CoreWeave. Agrawal said: "These financings highlight our ability to drive a sustained reduction in our cost of capital and the increasing depth of access we have to the capital market."

Interest expenses remained high for the quarter, however, at $267m. The company expects Q3 interest expenses to be between $350 million and $390 million, "impacted by increased debt to support our demand-led capex growth, [and] partly offset by increasingly lower cost of capital."

The company has no debt maturities until 2028.

Other key metrics from the earnings results include adjusted EBITDA, which was $753m with a 62 percent margin, up from the previous quarter's $606.13m. Adjusted operating income, meanwhile, was $200m with a 16 percent margin, an increase from Q1's $163m, while net loss for the quarter was $291m.

Following the earnings call, shares in CoreWeave dropped, but have since risen by 6.42 percent to $148.75.