AI cloud earnings deliver the growth, and the bill that comes with it

by Ryo Tanaka · August 12, 2026

Technology Reporter, US Market Current

A cluster of artificial intelligence infrastructure companies reported results after Tuesday's close, and the market's verdict on Wednesday was emphatic. CoreWeave rose 18.6% by midday Eastern, leaving the stock up roughly 50% for the year, according to Yahoo Finance, after posting second quarter revenue of $2.58 billion against a consensus estimate of $2.56 billion and an adjusted loss of $1.14 a share where analysts had modeled a $1.21 loss.

The revenue growth is the easy part of the story. CoreWeave's top line rose 112% from $1.212 billion a year earlier, and its revenue backlog reached $104 billion as of June 30, up from $99.4 billion at the end of the first quarter, according to Blockspace's review of the filing. The company said it secured more than $25 billion in net new customer commitments in early July alone. Adjusted EBITDA doubled to $1.51 billion, though the margin on that measure narrowed to 59% from 62%.

The harder part sits below the revenue line. CoreWeave's net loss widened to $626 million from $290 million a year earlier, an increase of 116%, while net interest expense reached $640 million for the quarter — a figure larger than the entire quarterly revenue of some of its listed peers. Quartz attributed the widening loss primarily to those financing costs. Spending on property and equipment ran to $6.422 billion in the three months, roughly two and a half times what the business collected in revenue over the same period.

Management leaned into scale anyway. Chief executive and co-founder Michael Intrator said the company had reached what he called an important inflection point as scale began translating into operating leverage. CoreWeave added nearly 500 megawatts of active power during the quarter to reach a 1.5 gigawatt active footprint, with roughly 3.7 gigawatts under contract. It guided third quarter revenue to a range of $3.45 billion to $3.6 billion and lifted full-year revenue guidance to $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion from $12 billion to $13 billion, raised full-year operating income guidance to between $960 million and $1.15 billion, and increased its year-end active power target to 1.85 gigawatts from 1.7 gigawatts.

Nebius Group told a structurally similar story at a smaller scale. Revenue reached $582.3 million in the second quarter, up 454% from $105.1 million a year earlier, with annualized recurring revenue hitting $3 billion at the end of June against $1.9 billion in March. Adjusted EBITDA swung to a positive $236.2 million from a $21 million loss, while the company still recorded a GAAP net loss of $190.4 million and an adjusted loss of $0.68 a share. Capital expenditure for the quarter was $5.66 billion, and Nebius raised its end-of-2026 capacity guidance to 5 gigawatts while maintaining full-year revenue guidance of $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion. Shares were up 16.5% at Wednesday's open, TheStreet reported.

Super Micro Computer, which sells the servers rather than the cloud capacity, showed the margin side of the trade improving. Fourth quarter fiscal 2026 revenue of $11.12 billion fell short of the $11.56 billion consensus, but earnings of $1.70 a share came in well above the $0.96 expected, and gross margin expanded to 17.5% from 9.5% a year earlier on what management described as a richer enterprise customer mix and wider adoption of its data center building block architecture. Chief executive Charles Liang said the company generated more than $60 billion in new orders and entered fiscal 2027 with a record backlog, guiding full-year revenue to a range of $65 billion to $72 billion. Operating cash flow for the year was negative $6.8 billion. The stock opened 9% higher on Wednesday, per TheStreet.

The read-across lifted the broader semiconductor and hardware complex. Intel gained 3.72% to $101.34 and Nvidia rose 2.94% to $223.88 in Wednesday trading, according to the Sunday Guardian, while the Nasdaq Composite added 0.70% to 26,632 in the morning session, per 24/7 Wall St. Cisco Systems climbed 2.36% ahead of its own results, which Yahoo Finance listed among Wednesday's scheduled reports alongside Coherent and Cerebras Systems.

Taken together the quarter reinforces a pattern that has defined this cycle: demand for AI compute is being contracted years in advance, and the companies serving it are converting that visibility into enormous, debt-financed construction programs. Backlogs of $104 billion and order books above $60 billion are not forecasts in the ordinary sense — they are commitments. Whether the interest expense, the negative operating cash flow and the depreciation schedules that come with them prove manageable depends on how durable those commitments turn out to be, a question no single quarter can answer.