By Nate Wolf

After a brutal selloff to end 2025, CoreWeave has quietly regained the trust of investors. That confidence will be put to the test next week.

CoreWeave reports fourth-quarter earnings after the closing bell on Thursday, Feb. 26. The focus won't be earnings per share or revenue. Instead, investors want to gauge how quickly the artificial-intelligence infrastructure company can deliver power to its clients.

CoreWeave went public less than a year ago at $40 a share and saw its stock soar to $183.58 apiece on June 20. Things flipped in the second half of the year, as concerns over financing costs and the sustainability of the AI boom sent shares spiraling. Construction delays announced in the company's third-quarter earnings report caused a further pullback.

But investors are flooding into the stock yet again. CoreWeave shares had jumped 36% this year to $97.14 as of Thursday's close, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite had declined 2.4%.

"This makes for a reasonably difficult setup and one where management needs to thread the needle," Morgan Stanley analysts Keith Weiss and Josh Baer wrote in a research note Friday. The pair have an Equal-weight rating and a $99 price target on CoreWeave stock.

Power -- the primary constraint in the buildout of AI data centers -- remains a focus. CoreWeave has secured large deals with AI hyperscalers, including an expansion of an agreement with Nvidia to deliver five gigawatts of "AI factories" by 2030.

The company had 590 megawatts in active power at the end of the third quarter. Shareholders will want to see at least 850 megawatts this time around, Weiss and Baer said. They will also want to learn how CoreWeave plans to secure the five gigawatts it owes Nvidia and what kind of assistance it will get from the chip maker.

That level of expansion isn't easy. "We're trying to build infrastructure at a pace the world has never seen before," CEO Michael Intrator told Barron's recently. "I cannot deliver enough compute. Nobody can get enough infrastructure."

Another hurdle popped up on Friday. CoreWeave stock was down 7.2% to $90.11 in morning trading after Business Insider reported that Blue Owl Capital was unable to arrange financing for a $4 billion data center in Pennsylvania that it is codeveloping for CoreWeave. Investors are growing cautious about financing AI players without ideal credit, Business Insider reported, citing an executive who arranges such deals.

"We have not experienced financing issues on this project," Blue Owl told Barron's in a statement. Under the agreement with CoreWeave, the firm is obligated to provide $500 million in bridge financing through the end of March, "and that commitment remains fully in place," it said.

CoreWeave also denied the report, with a spokesperson telling Barron's that the facility "is fully funded, under construction, and moving forward as planned."

"There has been no change to the project's timeline," they added.

In an environment where every watt of power counts, the fate of the Pennsylvania data center will almost certainly be a point of discussion in next Thursday's earnings call. Expectations are high, and investors tend to punish the company for any missteps.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 20, 2026 11:33 ET (16:33 GMT)

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