CoreWeave reports earnings for the second time as a public company on Tuesday afternoon. The lockup period for CoreWeave stock tied to the company's initial public offering expires Thursday, earlier than usual.
CoreWeave rents out computer servers equipped with Nvidia chip-equipped servers. Nvidia owns a 7% stake in CoreWeave and is a strategic partner. Microsoft has been CoreWeave's biggest customer.
CoreWeave and other cloud infrastructure startups rent Nvidia-chip equipped computer servers mainly to artificial intelligence model builders as well as app developers. CoreWeave's data centers are designed from scratch for crunching AI workloads.
There's been some confusion related to the CoreWeave IPO lockup. Lockup periods prevent company insiders from selling stock, usually for 180 days. When the lockups expire, insider selling sometimes pressures a stock.
CoreWeave Stock: IPO Lockup Ends Thursday?
The company launched its IPO offering and the lockup normally would be around Sept. 24. In CoreWeaves case, though, the lockup will apparently expire two days after it reports earnings for the second time as a public company.
"The prospectus is clear: it's going to be two days after this week's earnings report," MoffettNathanson analyst Nick del Deo told IBD in an email.
A Citigroup report published today said: "Heading into Q2 earnings for CoreWeave, we reiterate our bullish stance on AI demand and CRWV's ability to outperform near-term topline targets. Though CoreWeave has an expiring lockup that frees up 83% of Class A shares beginning the morning of Aug. 15 we believe strong fundamentals can help absorb the increase in float. Specifically, we see room for another double-digit percentage top-line beat possible in Q2 amid countless signs of inflecting AI demand across the industry."
Will Core Scientific Deal Fall Through?
CoreWeave stock has jumped 225% in 2025. But the stock sold off in June after the company announced a deal to acquire Core Scientific in an all-stock deal initially valued at $9 billion. Amid the pullback in CoreWeave stock, some CoreScientific shareholders will reportedly vote against the deal.
Core Scientific also offers data-center infrastructure.
So the IPO lockup expiration comes at a crucial time. And some Wall Street analysts say it's unclear when the IPO lockup expires.
"It is unclear," Gil Luria, analyst at D.A. Davidson told IBD in an email. "There is some language in the original S1 that leaves it open that they would end the lockup right after reporting the second quarter, but it is ambiguous enough that the date may still be the six month date (Sept. 24)."
Luria added: "It is possible that they would do a secondary issuance of locked up shares in order to preempt a lockup up as well. We may get an update on that when they report Tuesday."
CoreWeave Stock: JPMorgan Hikes Price Target
CoreWeave operates 33 data centers in the U.S. and Europe. Also, CoreWeave has preferred access to Nvidia's graphic processing units. Its cloud offerings are optimized for training and inference required to perform AI tasks.
For the June quarter, analysts estimate an adjusted loss of 23 cents per share for CoreWeave stock on revenue of $1.082 billion.
"We see a high likelihood of a strong beat versus guidance and consensus, but a more difficult path when it comes to outperforming lofty investor expectations, keeping us equal-weight," said Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss in a Q2 earnings preview. He added: "We still see near-term downside to the shares given the upcoming (Aug.14) lock-up expiration which will materially increase float for the stock."
JPMorgan on Monday raised its price target on CoreWeave stock to 135.
"Heading into CoreWeave's June quarter earnings results next week, the central theme is the ongoing shortage in global AI capacity coupled with the huge ramp in demand to continually push frontier models forward," said JPMorgan analyst Mark Murphy in a report. "While the long-term AI ramp trend is clear, the exact timing of CoreWeave's large slugs of bookings and sequencing of infrastructure build-outs naturally carry uncertainty quarter-to-quarter, and may pose ongoing extreme volatility in CRWV shares: caveat emptor."
CoreWeave Technical Rating
He added: "However, although timing and lumpiness still give us pause and create extreme volatility, we are positive on the potential for continued momentum in CoreWeave's business pipeline, and our field work suggests long-range potential for binary-outcome transactions which are very difficult to handicap and, if successful, can drive a very surprising magnitude of outsized growth and outsized debt financing with short-term cash burn."
Meanwhile, CoreWeave stock holds an Accumulation/Distribution Rating of A-minus. That rating analyzes price and volume changes in a stock over the past 13 weeks of trading. (A+ signifies heavy institutional buying; E means heavy selling. Think of a C grade as neutral.)
Follow Reinhardt Krause on Twitter @reinhardtk_tech for updates on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
