CoreWeave's stock is in freefall, plummeting nearly 20% as investors grow increasingly anxious about the AI infrastructure company's aggressive spending strategy and mounting debt obligations. CEO Mike Intrator scrambled to defend the company's approach, telling shareholders that the accelerated infrastructure buildout is an intentional bet on sustained AI demand. But Wall Street isn't buying it - the sharp selloff signals growing skepticism about whether the economics of GPU cloud computing can justify the massive capital expenditures required to stay competitive.
CoreWeave is having the kind of day that keeps CEOs up at night. The GPU cloud provider watched its stock crater nearly 20% as investors lost confidence in the company's capital-intensive growth strategy and raised red flags about its debt position.
CEO Mike Intrator went into damage control mode, pushing back against what he characterized as an unfair narrative around the company's financial health. According to CNBC, Intrator emphasized that CoreWeave has "intentionally accelerated its infrastructure buildout" - framing the aggressive spending not as reckless expansion but as calculated positioning for what the company believes will be explosive AI compute demand.
But investors aren't convinced. The massive selloff suggests Wall Street is questioning whether CoreWeave's bet will pay off, or whether the company is overleveraged at exactly the wrong moment. The timing couldn't be worse - public market enthusiasm for AI infrastructure plays has cooled considerably as investors demand clearer paths to profitability rather than pure growth stories.
CoreWeave's business model depends on securing massive quantities of Nvidia GPUs and building out datacenter capacity at breakneck speed. That requires enormous upfront capital - money that typically comes from a mix of debt financing and customer prepayments. When growth is the only story, debt levels can spook investors quickly, especially if there's any hint that customer demand might not materialize as expected.
