CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) stock is surging 12% in Friday’s session, climbing from a prior close of $92 to $103, after the company announced a multiyear agreement with Anthropic to provide cloud computing capabilities for Anthropic’s Claude AI models. It’s the second landmark contract announcement in two consecutive trading days, and the market is taking notice.
Thursday brought a $21 billion expanded agreement with Meta Platforms to supply AI cloud capacity through December 2032. Friday delivers Anthropic. CoreWeave is assembling a who’s-who roster of the world’s most important AI companies, and the pace is accelerating.
The intraday price action tells the story clearly. CoreWeave stock opened at $93.44, surged to an intraday high of $105.90 by 11:00 a.m. EST, and has since stabilized near $103 through the afternoon session. The peak volume candle hit at 10:30 a.m. EST, with over 4.4 million shares trading in a single 15-minute window.
Anthropic Deal Adds a Crown Jewel to the Customer List
Under the multiyear agreement, CoreWeave will provide computing capabilities to build and power Anthropic’s Claude AI models, with Anthropic running workloads at production scale. The agreement starts with a phased rollout and includes the option to expand in the future. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The significance of landing Anthropic as a customer is hard to overstate. Anthropic’s revenue run rate has topped $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. That’s extraordinary growth for any company, and sustaining it requires an enormous and growing supply of compute. CoreWeave is stepping in to fill that near-term capacity need.
Anthropic is simultaneously pursuing compute from multiple sources: it’s accessing 3.5 gigawatts of Alphabet‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO)-made Tensor Processing Units starting in 2027, and Reuters reported Friday that Anthropic is also exploring designing its own AI processors. Anthropic’s compute appetite is so massive that no single provider can satisfy it alone — CoreWeave is simply one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Two Days, Two Deals: The Backlog Keeps Growing
After CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator commented on the company’s deal with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), he made the company’s positioning clear. “This is another example that leading companies are choosing CoreWeave’s AI cloud to run their most demanding workloads,” he said. The Anthropic deal, announced just one day later, reinforces exactly that point.
CoreWeave’s total revenue backlog stood at $66.8 billion following the Meta deal announcement. That figure doesn’t yet reflect the Anthropic agreement. The company is guiding for $12 billion to $13 billion in 2026 revenue, which would represent a massive step up from $5.13 billion in full-year 2025 revenue, itself a 168% year-over-year gain.
For more on why the Meta deal matters beyond the headline number, this analysis digs into the financial structure and capital intensity debate. The short version: the backlog provides visibility that offsets some of the concern around CoreWeave’s aggressive spending posture.
The Bull and Bear Cases Are Both Real
The macro backdrop is supportive. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM) reported Q1 2026 revenue jumped 35% year-over-year on strong AI chip demand, confirming that AI infrastructure spending remains robust. OpenAI has partnered with Broadcom to develop upward of 10 gigawatts of custom chips, and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy signaled this week that Amazon could sell AI chips to third parties in the future. CoreWeave sits at the center of this compute land grab.
That said, the financial risks are genuine and worth keeping in focus. CoreWeave carries $21 billion in long-term debt as of December 31, 2025, and free cash flow remains deeply negative due to capital intensity, with a $30 billion to $35 billion capex plan for 2026. The 33 Wall Street analysts covering CRWV stock have a consensus price target of $120, implying further upside from current levels even after today’s move.
CoreWeave stock was up 28% year-to-date heading into today’s session, and the stock has more than doubled from its IPO price of $40 per share in late March 2025. Watch for whether the stock holds above $103 into the close. Any further commentary from CoreWeave or Anthropic on the scope of the agreement could shape the next move.
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