There are not many days where Wall Street sees a major high-flyer of a stock take on its first significant analyst downgrade (after a 100% gain since its IPO) only to see a double-digit percentage rally to even newer all-time highs. just don’t tell that to CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWV).
CoreWeave’s recent first quarter earnings report is after it raised $1.4 billion in a choppy March-2025 IPO at 440 per share. The stock is now up over 100% (make that 200%) as revenue growth is considered stellar even by AI-hungry investors. CoreWeave is even heavily dependent upon just a few suppliers and its finances are still “emerging” as a newly public stock. And the company even plans to invest $21 billion to $23 billion in capital spending this year.
One thing that investors should keep in mind is that CoreWeave as a very close relationship with Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) beyond just buying NVIDIA’s AI-chips and GPUs like there is no tomorrow. NVIDIA owns 24.2 million CoreWeave shares at the present time. In short, NVIDIA is a big shareholder, as well as a vendor and customer of CoreWeave.
Barclays is the largest firm that has so far downgraded CoreWeave since its IPO this year. It just downgraded the shares to Equal-Weight from Overweight but it did come with a caveat — its downgrade included that Barclays was also raising its price target to $100 from $70.
CoreWeave was last seen trading up almost 17% at $120.20. Sure, a delay by the Trump administration on E.U. tariffs is a help for almost every company on the same day — but not like this.
Raimo Lenschow, the Barclays analyst who issued the downgraded, believes that investors will have a hard time setting an appropriate valuation to this high-growth asset. The firm noted that there is simply no close comparable peer valuation to use. Lenschow also worries this could contribute to significant volatility in the stock as has been seen in the last two weeks alone. Still, the report did say:
“We continue to like CoreWeave for its long-term opportunity and exposure to the GenAI theme, but given valuation and lacking a near-term catalyst, see limited upside in the near-term from here.”
CoreWeave’s revenues were $981.6 million in the quarter ending in March. That’s up a sharp 31% from teh quarter ending last December. Its trailing 12-month revenues have now eclipsed $2.7 billion and Wall Street’s consensus is for $5 billion in annual revenues this year and almost $11.6 billion in 2026.
This fresh analyst downgrade from Barclays is not actually the first downgrade seen since CoreWeave’s IP earlier this year. On May 15 (2025), the firm D.A. Davidson downgraded CoreWeave to Underperform from Neutral with a $36.00 price target. And on May 22 (2025), CoreWeave was initiated in new coverage with a mere Market Perform rating at JMP Securities. That said, here is a list of all the recent price targets and ratings reiterations seen since its earnings report:
- Barclays (Overweight) target to $70 from $60
- BofA (Buy) price objective to $76 from $42
- Citi (neutral) target to $94 from $43
- Goldman Sachs (Neutral) target to $61 from $54
- JPMorgan (Overweight) target to $66 from $43
- Mizuho (Outperform) target to $70 from $46
- Morgan Stanley (Equal-Weight) target to $58 from $46
- Needham (Buy) target to $78 from $55
- Wells Fargo (Equal Weight) target to $60 from $50
BofA’s most recent Investment Rationale said that CoreWeave offers a compute service that is purpose built for AI workloads with an accelerated GPU deployment cycle of 2.5 months (vs. 4-6 months for general purpose hyperscalers). It also likes the lower failure rates (1x interruption per day versus 2.2x) and an increase in GPU utilization rate by 20%.
Well, that’s it in a nutshell.
PLEASE NOTE: Oggonomics does not have any formal price targets of its own and does not maintain any formal ratings on the companies in this report. This should not be interpreted as investment advice, and it is not intended to represent a recommendation to buy or sell any securities of the companies named.
