NVIDIA Corporation's godson CoreWeave (CRWV.US) plunges 12% after hours! With a 670 billion order backlog, the heavy sword, but faces Q1 guidance "dark arrow"

In after-hours trading on Thursday, CoreWeave (CRWV.US) stock price dropped by 12% at one point. The cloud infrastructure provider focusing on artificial intelligence announced fourth quarter revenue, which was higher than Wall Street expectations, but failed to boost the stock price. According to the announcement, CoreWeave's fourth quarter revenue increased by 110% year-on-year to $1.57 billion, slightly exceeding the market average expectation of $1.55 billion. The loss per share was 89 cents, falling short of the market average expectation. At the time of writing, the stock had plunged by 9.56% after hours. In terms of performance guidance, the company expects full-year revenue for 2026 to be between $12 billion and $13 billion, analysts had previously expected $12.09 billion; and adjusted operating profit for 2026 is estimated to be $900 million to $1.1 billion. However, the revenue guidance for the first quarter is between $1.9 billion and $2 billion, lower than the market consensus expectation of $2.29 billion. CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator said during an analyst conference call that the demand for their core service, NVIDIA Corporation graphic chips, still exceeds supply. He pointed out that the average price of the NVIDIA Corporation H100 processor in the fourth quarter fluctuated by less than 10% from the beginning of the year, while prices for the older A100 chips increased in 2025. The company plans to set a capital expenditure target of $30 billion to $35 billion for 2026, significantly higher than the $10.31 billion in 2025. By the end of last year, the company's active power capacity was 850 megawatts, with contracted power reaching 3.1 gigawatts (market expected active power of around 827 megawatts). CoreWeave expects active power to exceed 1.7 gigawatts by the end of 2026 (higher than the market expectation of 1.59 gigawatts), and plans to add over 5 gigawatts by 2030 based on the existing contracted capacity. Intrator said: "Demand is transitioning from initially focusing on super-large-scale cloud and foundational model domains to spreading across the entire economy. Enterprise demand is experiencing explosive growth, sovereign demand is emerging, and new players are entering to secure the necessary infrastructure." The company's revenue backlog soared from $56 billion at the end of the third quarter to $66.8 billion. Adjusted EBITDA was $898 million, lower than the market expectation of $929 million. Since going public in March of last year, the company's debt reached $21.37 billion by December 31. Recent developments in the AI industry have raised concerns among software investors, with announcements from companies like Anthropic leading to sell-offs in related stocks. CoreWeave provides support to AI model manufacturers such as Alphabet Inc. Class C and OpenAI, and its stock price had risen by 36% by Thursday's close, while the iShares expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF fell by nearly 22% during the same period. This quarter, CoreWeave partnered with model developer Poolside and launched object storage services, increasing their credit limit from $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion. Despite the storage business helping them to compete with giants like Amazon.com, Inc. AWS, the company remains focused on the professional cloud infrastructure sector. Intrator wrote in a blog post: "By 2025, CoreWeave became the fastest cloud platform to surpass $5 billion in annual revenue."