CoreWeave Bulls Face Off Against Short Sellers as Shares Spike

CoreWeave Inc. shares have been on a tear as investors snap up the stock despite widespread concerns about elevated debt levels, the rate of cash-burn and the long-term demand for the cloud-computing services it provides.

The shares have more than doubled in price in May after CoreWeave reported a deal with OpenAI worth as much as $4 billion to rent out computing power to process artificial intelligence demands. Meanwhile, CoreWeave’s first earnings report this month showed solid revenue growth and customers like Microsoft Corp. have recently pledged to keep spending heavily on AI computing.

The bullish sentiment around the firm has brought out a growing number of bears, who have been actively shorting into the rally and are showing few signs of relenting. So far, the company’s believers have been winning out, helped by the relatively limited number of shares available to trade, which can exaggerate share moves in either direction. The stock was up more than 4% in early trading Friday as the broader market fell.

“The risk level is very high versus what I could get investing in Microsoft, for example,” said Pat Burton, senior managing director at Winslow Capital Management.

The tug-of-war was evident this week, when the stock fell 6.7% on Thursday after rising 19% the day before. The shares are now up more than 160% since the firm went public at $40 a share in March. The stock’s recent run is a marked contrast to the mood around the company’s initial public offering, when CoreWeave raised less money than initially planned.

For bulls like Mark Klein, whose firm was an early investor in CoreWeave, the appeal remains strong as a result of growing demand for infrastructure required by AI services. CoreWeave has specialized in marshaling high-powered chips from Nvidia Corp., which held 7% of its shares as of March 31.

“They are in the right industry, they’re the best at what they do, they have huge tailwinds behind them, and they’ve executed,” said Klein, who is chief executive of SuRo Capital.

So far, though, the rally has only increased traders’ appetite to bet against the stock. The percentage of CoreWeave shares that have been borrowed by short sellers — a proxy for the level of short interest — rose from 18% in late April to 45% earlier this week, according to data from S3 Partners LLC.

The rising share price could eventually generate enough losses for short sellers to force them to liquidate their positions and purchase back the shares they had borrowed. This could lead to a spiral of buying known as a short squeeze that would push the stock even higher. But Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3, said he is not seeing signs of that sort of capitulation yet.

“It is ready to be squeezed,” Dusaniwsky said. “But there’s a ton of new shorts at these price levels. So it very well might be that you might see shorts getting squeezed out and immediately replaced by new shorts.”

To bears, the company’s heavy capital needs, high borrowing costs and the uncertainty about long-term demand for AI services are a risky combination. In the first quarter, CoreWeave’s loss per share widened to $1.49 a share, up from 62 cents during the same period a year ago.

The company is targeting $20 billion to $23 billion in capital spending this year, which will be funded by raising debt. The company’s ratio of debt to total assets stood at 54% on March 31, higher than the 30% average of the Nasdaq 100 index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

More than 65% of the analysts tracked by Bloomberg that cover CoreWeave have hold or sell equivalent ratings. In a downgrade last week, D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria compared CoreWeave to the troubled co-working company WeWork and said it is not worth scaling the business due to the small returns it has achieved relative to its borrowing costs.

CoreWeave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Greg Miller of Citizens cited risks to CoreWeave’s funding when he initiated coverage of the company on May 22 with a market perform rating.

“While we can buy into a business model that requires the level of incremental funding demanded (~$30.0 billion), the current risk level relative to the business model is simply too high, in our view, with too many unknowns,” Miller wrote.

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