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CRWV vs. NBIS: Which AI Infrastructure Stock is the Smarter Buy Now?
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Key Takeaways
CoreWeave's revenues jumped 207% to $1.2B, backed by data center expansion.
Nebius posted 625% revenue growth to $105.1M and raised ARR guidance to up to $1.1B.
CRWV's scale gives it the edge over NBIS, though debt and customer reliance pose risks.
The rapid proliferation of AI applications ranging from generative AI to autonomous systems has triggered unprecedented demand for high-performance computing power. The demand has given rise to companies that are solely focused on providing AI-focused cloud infrastructure, and among the most talked-about names are CoreWeave (CRWV - Free Report) and Nebius (NBIS - Free Report) .
Both CRWV and NBIS are emerging AI-focused cloud infrastructure providers, positioning themselves as flexible alternatives to traditional hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Azure, aiming to capture the growing demand for AI cloud solutions. Per an IDC report, spending on AI infrastructure is expected to top $200 billion by 2028.
This uptrend in spending benefits both CoreWeave and Nebius, but not equally. Their strategies, partnerships, and execution capabilities reveal key differences that are crucial for investors to understand. So, if an investor wants to make a smart buy in the AI infrastructure space, which stock stands out?
Given this backdrop, let’s scrutinize closely to find out which AI infra stock currently holds the edge, and more importantly, which might be the smarter bet now.
The Case for CRWV
CoreWeave is an AI-focused hyperscaler company, and its cloud platform has been developed to scale, support, and accelerate GenAI. It has fast emerged as a leading AI infrastructure provider, thanks in part to its close partnership with NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA - Free Report) . The collaboration offers priority access to the latest high-performance GPUs that power AI workloads. CRWV was the first to deliver NVIDIA’s H100 and H200 GPUs at scale, and the first to offer GB200 NVL72 instances. CoreWeave also deployed NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and HGX B200 systems at scale, integrated into its “Mission Control” for reliability and performance.
CoreWeave is aggressively building out its data center network, allowing it to serve a diverse client base with low latency and strong reliability. CRWV had nearly 470 megawatts (MW) of active power and contracted power of 2.2 gigawatts (GW) at the quarter-end. With over 900 MW of active power targeted by the year-end, CRWV is positioning itself as a top-tier provider capable of meeting the needs of large-scale AI training and inference workloads. Key projects include a $6 billion data center investment in Lancaster, PA and another data center in Kenilworth, New Jersey, through a joint venture with Blue Owl. The company’s market position is further reinforced by its $30.1 billion contracted backlog at the end of the second quarter, up $4 billion from the first quarter and doubling year to date. Revenues in the second quarter were a record $1.2 billion, which beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 12.5% and jumped 207% year over year.
Continued product innovation and the addition of new features bode well. It also expanded object storage offerings with automatic tiering and launched new offerings like CoreWeave and Weights & Biases Inference service. The new inference service supports a research-friendly API for OpenAI’s new open-source model, Kimi K2, Meta’s Llama 4, DeepSeek and QnA3. It is investing in SUNK (Slurm on Kubernetes) for large AI labs and enterprises and is now offering support for third-party storage systems (VAST, WEKA, IBM Spectrum Scale, DDN and Pure Storage) integrated into its technology stack with large-scale production deployments.
Nonetheless, massive capital expenditures and high interest expenses owing to heavy debt remain concerning. CRWV expects capex to be between $20 billion and $23 billion for 2025. Higher capex can be a concern if revenue does not keep up the required pace to sustain such high capital intensity. Coming to debt, CRWV has raised a staggering $25 billion in debt and equity since 2024. Interest expense surged to $267 million compared with $67 million a year ago. For the third quarter, it expects interest expenses to be between $350 million and $390 million, owing to high leverage. Higher interest expenses can exert pressure on the adjusted net income and potentially affect free cash flow generation and undermine near-term profitability.
Another potential drawback is its customer concentration risk. CoreWeave’s 77% of total revenues in 2024 came from the top two customers. This intense customer concentration is a major risk, especially if the client migrates, as the revenue impact could be material. Apart from this evolving trade policy, macro uncertainty and volatility remain additional headwinds.
The Case for NBIS
Nebius, while smaller in scale, has emerged as an intriguing challenger to CoreWeave. The company’s revenues surged 625% year over year to $105.1 million in the second quarter of 2025. The increase in sales was primarily driven by strong performance in the company’s core AI business and excellent execution by the TripleTen team. AI cloud infrastructure revenues grew more than nine times year over year, driven by demand for copper GPUs and near-peak GPU utilization.
It achieved positive EBITDA in its core AI infrastructure business earlier than expected. It raised its guidance for annualized run rate (ARR) revenues from the previous range of $750 million to $1 billion to a new range of $900 million to $1.1 billion. Nebius called the AI infrastructure boom a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity.
Like CoreWeave, NBIS’ partnership with NVDA (also an investor in the company) is another plus. With the new Blackwell GPUs entering the market at scale and its data center capacity expanding significantly in parallel, the company expects a substantial increase in sales by year-end.
Nebius is focused on boosting its data center footprint and its GPU deployments as part of its strategy to ramp up installed capacity across the United States and Europe. It plans to secure 220 megawatts of connected power (active or ready for GPU deployment), and this also includes data centers in New Jersey and Finland. The company is also finalizing two new large-scale greenfield sites in the United States. NBIS plans to build out over 1 gigawatt of power capacity by 2026, setting the stage for sustained growth into the AI compute boom.
While the scale-up demands capital, management pointed to significant cash on hand and an opportunistic approach to raising capital. NBIS has reaffirmed its 2025 capex guidance at $2 billion. Now, $2 billion capex is a huge cash outlay even with a $4 billion capital raised to date. Higher capex can be a concern if revenues do not keep up the required pace to sustain such high capital intensity, especially in a macro environment where AI demand cycles could fluctuate due to competitive pricing and regulatory changes. Moreover, scaling aggressively (multiple data centers in various regions) involves execution risk amid the intense competition from tech behemoths.
Share Performance for CRWV & NBIS
In the past month, CRWV has declined 17.2% while NBIS has surged 33.6%.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Valuation for CRWV & NBIS
Both CoreWeave and Nebius are overvalued, as suggested by the Value Score of F.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
In terms of Price/Book, NBIS shares are trading at 4.4X, lower than CRWV’s 15.76X.
How Do Zacks Estimates Compare for NBIS & CRWV?
Analysts have significantly revised their earnings estimates downward for CRWV’s bottom line for the current year.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
For NBIS, there is no change in earnings estimates over the past 60 days.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
NBIS or CRWV: Which is a Smarter Pick?
Currently, the stocks carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) each.
While both CoreWeave and Nebius are making strong strides in the AI infrastructure race, CoreWeave’s scale gives it an edge. While high leverage and customer concentration are risks, CRWV’s ability to onboard major clients outweighs these challenges. For investors seeking a capable AI infrastructure player, CRWV emerges as the smarter buy.
Image: Bigstock
CRWV vs. NBIS: Which AI Infrastructure Stock is the Smarter Buy Now?
Key Takeaways
The rapid proliferation of AI applications ranging from generative AI to autonomous systems has triggered unprecedented demand for high-performance computing power. The demand has given rise to companies that are solely focused on providing AI-focused cloud infrastructure, and among the most talked-about names are CoreWeave (CRWV - Free Report) and Nebius (NBIS - Free Report) .
Both CRWV and NBIS are emerging AI-focused cloud infrastructure providers, positioning themselves as flexible alternatives to traditional hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Azure, aiming to capture the growing demand for AI cloud solutions. Per an IDC report, spending on AI infrastructure is expected to top $200 billion by 2028.
This uptrend in spending benefits both CoreWeave and Nebius, but not equally. Their strategies, partnerships, and execution capabilities reveal key differences that are crucial for investors to understand. So, if an investor wants to make a smart buy in the AI infrastructure space, which stock stands out?
Given this backdrop, let’s scrutinize closely to find out which AI infra stock currently holds the edge, and more importantly, which might be the smarter bet now.
The Case for CRWV
CoreWeave is an AI-focused hyperscaler company, and its cloud platform has been developed to scale, support, and accelerate GenAI. It has fast emerged as a leading AI infrastructure provider, thanks in part to its close partnership with NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA - Free Report) . The collaboration offers priority access to the latest high-performance GPUs that power AI workloads. CRWV was the first to deliver NVIDIA’s H100 and H200 GPUs at scale, and the first to offer GB200 NVL72 instances. CoreWeave also deployed NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and HGX B200 systems at scale, integrated into its “Mission Control” for reliability and performance.
CoreWeave is aggressively building out its data center network, allowing it to serve a diverse client base with low latency and strong reliability. CRWV had nearly 470 megawatts (MW) of active power and contracted power of 2.2 gigawatts (GW) at the quarter-end. With over 900 MW of active power targeted by the year-end, CRWV is positioning itself as a top-tier provider capable of meeting the needs of large-scale AI training and inference workloads. Key projects include a $6 billion data center investment in Lancaster, PA and another data center in Kenilworth, New Jersey, through a joint venture with Blue Owl. The company’s market position is further reinforced by its $30.1 billion contracted backlog at the end of the second quarter, up $4 billion from the first quarter and doubling year to date. Revenues in the second quarter were a record $1.2 billion, which beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 12.5% and jumped 207% year over year.
Continued product innovation and the addition of new features bode well. It also expanded object storage offerings with automatic tiering and launched new offerings like CoreWeave and Weights & Biases Inference service. The new inference service supports a research-friendly API for OpenAI’s new open-source model, Kimi K2, Meta’s Llama 4, DeepSeek and QnA3. It is investing in SUNK (Slurm on Kubernetes) for large AI labs and enterprises and is now offering support for third-party storage systems (VAST, WEKA, IBM Spectrum Scale, DDN and Pure Storage) integrated into its technology stack with large-scale production deployments.
Nonetheless, massive capital expenditures and high interest expenses owing to heavy debt remain concerning. CRWV expects capex to be between $20 billion and $23 billion for 2025. Higher capex can be a concern if revenue does not keep up the required pace to sustain such high capital intensity. Coming to debt, CRWV has raised a staggering $25 billion in debt and equity since 2024. Interest expense surged to $267 million compared with $67 million a year ago. For the third quarter, it expects interest expenses to be between $350 million and $390 million, owing to high leverage. Higher interest expenses can exert pressure on the adjusted net income and potentially affect free cash flow generation and undermine near-term profitability.
Another potential drawback is its customer concentration risk. CoreWeave’s 77% of total revenues in 2024 came from the top two customers. This intense customer concentration is a major risk, especially if the client migrates, as the revenue impact could be material. Apart from this evolving trade policy, macro uncertainty and volatility remain additional headwinds.
The Case for NBIS
Nebius, while smaller in scale, has emerged as an intriguing challenger to CoreWeave. The company’s revenues surged 625% year over year to $105.1 million in the second quarter of 2025. The increase in sales was primarily driven by strong performance in the company’s core AI business and excellent execution by the TripleTen team. AI cloud infrastructure revenues grew more than nine times year over year, driven by demand for copper GPUs and near-peak GPU utilization.
It achieved positive EBITDA in its core AI infrastructure business earlier than expected. It raised its guidance for annualized run rate (ARR) revenues from the previous range of $750 million to $1 billion to a new range of $900 million to $1.1 billion. Nebius called the AI infrastructure boom a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity.
Like CoreWeave, NBIS’ partnership with NVDA (also an investor in the company) is another plus. With the new Blackwell GPUs entering the market at scale and its data center capacity expanding significantly in parallel, the company expects a substantial increase in sales by year-end.
Nebius is focused on boosting its data center footprint and its GPU deployments as part of its strategy to ramp up installed capacity across the United States and Europe. It plans to secure 220 megawatts of connected power (active or ready for GPU deployment), and this also includes data centers in New Jersey and Finland. The company is also finalizing two new large-scale greenfield sites in the United States. NBIS plans to build out over 1 gigawatt of power capacity by 2026, setting the stage for sustained growth into the AI compute boom.
While the scale-up demands capital, management pointed to significant cash on hand and an opportunistic approach to raising capital. NBIS has reaffirmed its 2025 capex guidance at $2 billion. Now, $2 billion capex is a huge cash outlay even with a $4 billion capital raised to date. Higher capex can be a concern if revenues do not keep up the required pace to sustain such high capital intensity, especially in a macro environment where AI demand cycles could fluctuate due to competitive pricing and regulatory changes. Moreover, scaling aggressively (multiple data centers in various regions) involves execution risk amid the intense competition from tech behemoths.
Share Performance for CRWV & NBIS
In the past month, CRWV has declined 17.2% while NBIS has surged 33.6%.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Valuation for CRWV & NBIS
Both CoreWeave and Nebius are overvalued, as suggested by the Value Score of F.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
In terms of Price/Book, NBIS shares are trading at 4.4X, lower than CRWV’s 15.76X.
How Do Zacks Estimates Compare for NBIS & CRWV?
Analysts have significantly revised their earnings estimates downward for CRWV’s bottom line for the current year.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
For NBIS, there is no change in earnings estimates over the past 60 days.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
NBIS or CRWV: Which is a Smarter Pick?
Currently, the stocks carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) each.
While both CoreWeave and Nebius are making strong strides in the AI infrastructure race, CoreWeave’s scale gives it an edge. While high leverage and customer concentration are risks, CRWV’s ability to onboard major clients outweighs these challenges. For investors seeking a capable AI infrastructure player, CRWV emerges as the smarter buy.
You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.