CoreWeave Stock Surges 13% On Anthropic Deal -- A Day After $21 Billion Meta Partnership

Coreweave shares popped 13% after announcing a deal with Anthropic on Friday to power its AI model Claude, following a $21 billion partnership with Meta announced Thursday.

Key Facts

Key Background

CoreWeave primarily generates revenue by building and renting out data centers packed with Nvidia GPUs that provide the energy and processing power to train and run AI models. Demand for infrastructure to develop AI has exploded since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, with Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon committing a combined $700 billion just this year in a race to build the most sophisticated and advanced models. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced that its leaked Mythos model was so powerful that they would be holding back from releasing it to the public because of its ability to find vulnerabilities in software programs. The Claude maker said it would instead provide the model to 40 select companies including Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft in a cybersecurity initiative dubbed Project Glasswing. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei and several former OpenAI employees who departed the ChatGPT maker over concerns about the company's direction with AI safety. Anthropic is now valued at $380 billion and announced it had reached an annual revenue run rate of $30 billion Monday, surpassing OpenAI's $25 billion annualized revenue as of February. OpenAI is now valued at $852 billion.

Big Number

$2.5 trillion. That's how much research firm Gartner expects global spend to build AI will reach in 2026, up 44% from last year. AI infrastructure will drive the spend, making up more than half of that figure, the firm estimates.

Tangent

The deals come as CoreWeave is simultaneously on an aggressive financing spree. The company is targeting $30 billion to $35 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, up from roughly $15 billion in 2025. Billionaire CEO Mike Intrator defended the spending strategy after the company's February earnings report drew criticism for the increase. "I understand the concerns that people have as they see us allocating a massive scale of money to this market, but the truth of the matter is, our backlog is enormous," he told CNBC at the time. Since going public in March 2025, the stock is up 160%, but is down nearly 45% from its peak last June. This year, the stock has been volatile, up 30% since January.

What To Watch For

With the financial terms of the Anthropic deal undisclosed, investors will be watching for any additional color on the contract's scope and duration in CoreWeave's next quarterly earnings report scheduled on May 13. Investors will also be watching how and if CoreWeave will be able to turn its debt pile into sustainable, high-margin cash flows. CoreWeave reported $5.1 billion in 2025 revenue -- nearly triple the $1.9 billion revenue in 2024 -- though it was not profitable with $1.1 billion in net losses.