CRWV is the preferred Neocloud stock for low execution risk given its scale, cost efficiency, and Nvidia backstop.
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And second, this category includes the Neoclouds, specialized AI infrastructure providers like Cororeweave, Nebius, and Iron, which are the focus of this video. One of them is the pretty clear winner, and I'll show you which one when we compare them.
There are three big reasons to focus on Neoclouds above other kinds of companies, at least for the near- term. First, they have deals with every kind of AI buyer, from startups like Perplexity and Figure AI all the way to the hyperscalers themselves.
That means that even their direct competitors are their customers.
and Meta Platforms signed a $21 billion contract with Cororeweave and has a contract with Nebius that's worth up to $27 billion.
Second, Nvidia itself is directly partnered with all three of these companies. Over the next 5 years, Nvidia is on the hook to buy any unused compute capacity from Cororeweave and use Iron's infrastructure for their own internal workloads under a $3.4 billion contract.
On top of that, Nvidia can buy up to $2.1 billion worth of iron stock as they deliver GPUs, and they've already invested $2 billion each into Corewave and Nebus.
All right, so Cororeweave, Nebius, and Iron are worth covering first because they're expected to triple their capacity over the next year. They're all directly partnered with Nvidia, and even their competitors are their customers.
Let's start with Cororeweave, ticker symbol CRWV, since it's the biggest of the three. Cororeweave operates 51 data centers purpose-built for AI across North America and Europe.
They have 1.5 gawatts of active power and 4.2 gawatt of power under contract.
We care about both numbers when we compare the Neoclouds because they mean different things. Active power is the electricity actually flowing into servers that are running today, while contracted power is the promise of future electricity to a site that may not even be built yet. Only active power actually generates revenue.
Nvidia's Blackwell racks hold 72 GPUs each and they take around 120 kW to power. That means Coreweave has enough contracted capacity to power over 30,000 racks or more than 2.2 million Blackwell GPUs.
Then they sell access to those GPUs either as bare metal chips or full stack instances that are managed through a cloud control pane that lets Cororeweave spin up clusters of GPUs, add in low latency networking and storage, and schedule large AI workloads all without touching the physical servers.
On their latest earnings call, Coree reported record revenues of $2.6 billion for the quarter, which was up 112% year-over-year. But like I've been saying for over a year now, the special thing about Cororeweave isn't their revenue growth.
It's their revenue backlog, which just reached $14 billion. That's up 246% year-over-year.
That growth is mostly driven by multi-year, multi-billion dollar contracts with massive companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms. In fact, Meta alone signed another $21 billion deal with Cororeweave back in March.
Another special thing about Cororeweave is their privileged relationship with Nvidia. Coreweave is basically the launchpad for Nvidia's latest chips. Last quarter, they were the first to validate Nvidia's Vera Rubin racks, including the Bluefield 4 GPUs and next generation networking solutions that help make sure that all these expensive GPUs are being fully utilized.
And like I said earlier, they have a formal $6.3 billion partnership where Nvidia will purchase any unsold cloud capacity from Cororeweave through April of 2032.
Earlier this year, Nvidia and Cororeweave also agreed to build out more than 5 gawatt of AI factories by 2030, enough to power millions more Nvidia GPUs. As part of this deal, Nvidia invested another $2 billion into Core stock at $87 per share.
That's actually higher than the stock trades today. So, anyone buying it now is getting a better price than Jensen Hong himself.
Speaking of prices, there's one insanely important number that determines whether a Neocloud survives or thrives, and that's the price they pay on the money that they borrow to build their infrastructure in the first place.
Building AI data centers means paying for everything upfront. the GPUs, the racks, the cooling, the power, all that gets bought years before they start making revenue.
For example, Core spent $9.4 billion on capital expenditures last quarter, even though they only made $2.6 billion. That's not a bad thing. It's the entire business model. Build it and they will come.
But that means they need to borrow money to build it in the first place.
Cororeweave has about $35 billion worth of loans, another 16 billion in lease obligations for the data centers they don't own, and $5.5 billion in cash. 35 + 16 - 5 is roughly $46 billion in net debt, but they paid $640 million in interest last quarter alone, which is about 25% of the revenues they brought in.
That makes a huge difference to their bottom line.
Cororee's operating losses for the quarter were $49 million, but their net loss was 626 million. Almost the entire difference is interest. That's why net debt and interest expenses are important numbers to compare across all three companies.
Either way, the takeaway for investors is pretty simple. Nvidia is Cororeweave's core infrastructure supplier, their launch platform, and their buyer of last resort, which seriously strengthens Cororeef's position in the Neocloud market.
But what Nvidia can't do is lower Core's interest expenses.
Now, let's compare Coreweave, Nebius, and Iron Stock. Here's a table summarizing everything I've covered. Keep in mind that I built it myself by pulling numbers from each company's latest earnings, and I tried to make every row as fair as I could, but all three companies have different fiscal calendars, different contract lengths, and they're scaling from very different starting points from the beginning of the year.
So, take this table as a good way to compare these companies, but not as official audited numbers.
First, Cororeweave has a lot more net debt than the other two companies. So, we want to compare them in terms of enterprise value instead of market cap. When you buy a business, you buy its assets and its debts minus whatever cash they're holding.
So enterprise value is a much better way to price debt heavy companies. Since Cororeweave's debt is as big as their market cap, their enterprise value ends up being twice as big.
That said, Cororeweave is the clear leader in terms of scale. They're the biggest enterprise with the most revenue, the deepest backlog, and 1.5 gawatt of active power actually running today.
But a quarter of every dollar they make goes right back to interest on their loans.
If you go by active power, cororeweave costs around $62 million per megawatt, while Nebius and iron are over $350 million each. So, Cororeweave is the cheapest by a factor of six.
So, if you're the kind of investor that wants exposure to this category of stocks with the lowest execution risk, Cororeweave is probably the stock for you. They're the biggest company by far with the most active power being used for AI right now, and they have Nvidia committed to buying any capacity they can't sell through April of 2032.
If I was a newer investor or closer to retirement, Cororeweave is the one I'd pick.
What this channel has said about $CRWV
Ticker Symbol: YOU has only this one call on this stock.