CoreWeave (CRWV) Stock Climbs on UBS Buy Rating and New Cloud Deal

TLDR

• CoreWeave stock rose about 1% in Wednesday premarket trading.
• UBS started coverage with a Buy rating and $120 price target.
• The target implies roughly 38% upside from Tuesday’s close.
• CoreWeave also announced a multi-year cloud deal with Harell Data.
• High leverage and customer concentration remain key investor risks.

CoreWeave (CRWV) stock rose about 1% in Wednesday premarket trading to roughly $87.65 after closing Tuesday at $86.76. The stock gained 1.6% Tuesday and is up around 19% this year.

CoreWeave, Inc. Class A Common Stock, CRWV

The main catalyst is a new bullish call from UBS. Analyst Karl Keirstead initiated coverage with a Buy rating and $120 price target, representing about 38% upside from Tuesday’s close.

UBS described the recommendation as a non-consensus positive call because investor sentiment around CoreWeave remains cautious. The firm believes worries about leverage and credit risk may be approaching a peak.

UBS Sees Stronger AI Compute Demand

Keirstead argues that investors may be underestimating the durability of demand for AI computing power. He expects demand to come increasingly from enterprises as well as the largest AI model developers.

UBS also expects stronger GPU economics to lift CoreWeave’s revenue generated per gigawatt. The firm estimates that figure could eventually rise above $15 billion from about $11 billion today.

CoreWeave currently trades at roughly three times UBS’s estimate of 2027 revenue. Keirstead views that valuation as attractive for a company expected to post rapid revenue growth, although that outlook depends heavily on continued AI infrastructure demand.

The $120 target is based on about 3.8 times projected 2028 sales. UBS also highlighted CoreWeave’s reputation for infrastructure reliability as a competitive advantage in AI cloud services.

CoreWeave’s balance sheet remains one of the central concerns. The company completed an upsized $4.2 billion offering of 2.875% convertible senior notes due in 2033 on September 22.

New Biotech AI Deal Adds Another Catalyst

CoreWeave also announced a multi-year agreement Wednesday with Harell Data. The biotech data platform will use CoreWeave Cloud for AI model training, fine-tuning and inference workloads.

Harell Data’s platform allows researchers to train models using proprietary scientific datasets without extracting the underlying data. Training will run on Nvidia A100 and Hopper GPUs supplied through CoreWeave.

The agreement gives CoreWeave another enterprise use case outside the large AI labs that have driven much of its growth. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, so its near-term revenue impact is unclear.

The main investor risks remain high leverage, rising financing costs and customer concentration. UBS noted that roughly 72% of CoreWeave revenue comes from just three customers, leaving results sensitive to spending changes at a small number of clients.

CoreWeave also faces uncertainty over long-term profitability in AI infrastructure as competition grows and capital requirements remain heavy. The company’s strong growth helps support the bullish case, but debt and concentration risks remain difficult to ignore.

For now, UBS’s $120 target appears to be the main driver of Wednesday’s premarket gain, while the Harell Data agreement provides a second positive catalyst. CRWV was trading near $87.65 ahead of the opening bell.