Shares of the cloud infrastructure company CoreWeave Inc. fell more than 9% in late trading today after it posted a bigger-than-expected loss per share and offered a weak revenue forecast for the current quarter.

The company, which is laser-focused on the artificial intelligence industry, reported a fourth-quarter adjusted loss per share of 56 cents, bigger than Wall Street’s consensus estimate of a 50-cent-per-share loss. It did at least surpass expectations on revenue. Sales rose 110% from the same quarter last year, generating $1.57 billion in revenue, above the $1.55 billion expected.

The results meant CoreWeave’s overall net loss widened significantly to $452 million at the end of the quarter, way up from a net loss of just $51 million a year earlier.

CoreWeave operates dozens of data centers that are primarily equipped with Nvidia Corp.’s graphics processing unts. It rents those chips out to enterprise customers and AI models developers looking for computing power to train and run powerful large language models, which consume vast resources. The company is considered to be one of the top “neoclouds,” which compete with established public cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure.

The full-year forecast doesn’t look too bad. The company is guiding for fiscal 2026 revenue of between $12 billion and $13 billion, which is better than the Street’s consensus of $12.09 billion. However, it’s not nearly as bullish in the near term. For the first quarter, CoreWeave anticipates sales of between $1.9 billion and $2 billion, well below the Street’s $2.29 billion target.

On a conference call with analysts, CoreWeave Chief Executive Michael Intrator (pictured) said Nvidia GPUs remain in short supply, putting upward pressure on prices. However, he said prices of Nvidia’s older H100 processors in the fourth quarter were within 10% of where they started the year, though the cost of its A100 prices had increased significantly during that time.

The company said it’s planning to increase its capital expenditures to between $30 billion and $35 billion in fiscal 2026, up from just $10.31 billion in the previous year. That investment is necessary to fuel its ambitious data center buildout so it can meet the surging demand for AI compute, Intrator told analysts. “We are virtually sold out in 2026 of all of our capacity and then continuing to add contracts that will be allocated once they come online in 2027,” he said.

CoreWeave ended the fiscal year with 850 megawatts of active power capacity, while its contracted power stood at 3.1 gigawatts. That suggests its buildout is currently ahead of schedule, as analysts had projected it to have about 827 megawatts in active power. It’s hopeful of bringing a total of 1.7 gigawatts of active power online by the end of 2026, and ultimately plans to add more than 5 gigawatts beyond its contracted footprint by 2030, Intrator said.

“We are seeing the proliferation of demand across the economy going from where it was initially housed within the hyperscaler clouds and the foundation models, and exploding into the enterprise,” Intrator said. “You’re seeing it move into sovereign. You’re seeing all these new participants beginning to come in and start securing the infrastructure that they need.”

CoreWeave’s revenue backlog swelled to $66.8 billion at the end of the quarter, up from $55.6 billion three months prior. Meanwhile, its reported debt stood at $21.37 billion at the end of the quarter.

While the market is busy punishing CoreWeave for its inconsistent numbers, analysts were much kinder. Holger Mueller of Constellation Research told SiliconANGLE that he felt it was a solid quarter overall, with revenue growing and its operating loss declining. “It has innovated well on product and its ARR has grown nicely,” he said. “Now the focus is on building out AI capacity, which is a challenge for everyone in the industry.”

Despite today’s drop, CoreWeave’s stock remains one of Wall Street’s best performers so far this year, having gained more than 36%. In contrast, the S&P 500 is up just 1% over the same time frame, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq index has declined more than 1% so far this year. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector Exchange-Traded Fund is down almost 22% in the year to date, due to the pounding taken by shares of software companies in recent weeks.

During the quarter, CoreWeave announced the launch of a new object storage service to help customers scale their AI workloads in a move that suggests it could be expanding its horizons beyond just compute infrastructure.

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