CoreWeave may have built a house of (graphics) cards

Comment CoreWeave this week said it would plow between $20 and $23 billion into GPU bit barns by year's end in order to meet growing demand from model builders and hyperscalers.

Those figures, along with new commitments from OpenAI and yet unnamed hyperscale customers, were no doubt intended to instill confidence in the rent-a-GPU outfit's long-term growth prospects.

In reality, the company's capex outlay illustrates just how fragile the Nvidia-backed AI infrastructure vendor's business model really is, despite what its triple-digit revenue gains this quarter might suggest.

In its first earnings call since its March IPO, CoreWeave revealed Q1 revenues surged 420 percent year over year to $982 million, far exceeding expectations. Despite this growth, it posted a net loss of $314.6 million. Still, the GPU-slinger expects to continue the momentum over the next quarter, forecasting revenue of between $1.06 billion and $1.1 ...