Michael Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, speaks at the Semafor World Economy Summit during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Spring meetings in Washington on April 25, 2025. The International Monetary Fund sharply lowered its forecasts for world growth for this year and next, warning the outlook could deteriorate further as US President Donald Trump’s tariffs spark a global trade war.
Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Uplifting earnings reports from Microsoft and Meta provided some relief to investors in cloud infrastructure supplier CoreWeave.
Shares of CoreWeave, which held its market debut in March, closed up 7% on Thursday after top client Microsoft reported better-than-expected cloud sales and reiterated spending plans for the new fiscal year. At the same time, Meta, another big CoreWeave customer, raised its forecast for 2025 capital expenditures.
While Microsoft, Meta and other tech giants have forecast massive buildout plans for their artificial intelligence infrastructure, President Donald Trump’s announcement last month of sweeping new tariffs on imports raised concerns that companies would have to reel in their expectations.
A Microsoft executive said in a LinkedIn post last month that the company was slowing down or pausing early data center projects. Also in April, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft had stopped discussions over development in some locations.
But the commentary on Wednesday’s earnings call suggests the company is standing relatively firm.
“The reality is we’ve always been making adjustments to build, lease, what pace we build all through the last, whatever, 10, 15 years,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the call. “It’s just that you all pay a lot more attention to what we do quarter-over-quarter nowadays.”
Microsoft said Azure and other cloud services revenue increased 33% in the quarter from a year earlier, exceeding estimates. Finance chief Amy Hood said she still expects capital expenditures to grow in the 2026 fiscal year, but at a slower rate than in the current year.
CoreWeave hit the public market just before Trump’s tariff announcement. Companies that were slated to follow, including online lender Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub, delayed their offerings.
With CoreWeave’s gain on Thursday, its sharpest move up since April 2, the stock is trading at around $45, which is $5 above its IPO price.
Microsoft called on CoreWeave to provide Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) in 2023, following the speedy rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which relies on Microsoft for cloud capacity. Microsoft represented 62% of CoreWeave’s revenue in 2024.
In March, CoreWeave announced a deal directly with OpenAI that would be worth $11.9 billion over five years. Because of that deal and others, Microsoft will represent less than half of expected future committed contract revenue, CoreWeave has said.
CoreWeave got its start in cryptocurrency mining with Nvidia chips in 2017 under a different name before rebranding and expanding its focus in 2019. The company now competes with the world’s top cloud providers, as well as smaller-scale operators such as Lambda.
Microsoft had $94.8 billion in finance leases that had not been completed as of March 31, down from nearly $109 million two quarters earlier, according to a filing. Microsoft gains access to CoreWeave’s infrastructure through finance leases as a supplement to the Nvidia GPUs in its own data centers.
CoreWeave will issue its first earnings report as a public company on May 14.
