CRWV Q2 2026 - Post-Call Earnings Update

Event: Quartr Q2 2026 event Retrieved: 2026-08-11T22:30:00Z Comparison mode: maximal Scorecard contract: v1

Consensus scorecard

• Carried forward unchanged from the 2026-08-11 preliminary report. Nothing on the call revised either actual, and neither management nor any of the six analysts referenced a consensus estimate at any point. CFO Nitin Agrawal restated revenue as $2.6bn, up 112% year over year and 24% sequentially - the sequential rate is new - and no per-share figure of any kind was given on the call, so the GAAP diluted basis in the scorecard remains the only eligible EPS actual.

Management and Q&A

• The call ran with six analysts: Samik Chatterjee of J.P. Morgan, Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank, Ervin Lou on for Amit Daryanani of Evercore ISI, Raimo Lenschow of Barclays, Michael Turrin of Wells Fargo and Brett Knoblauch of Cantor Fitzgerald. CEO Michael Intrator and CFO Nitin Agrawal presented.
• The guidance the release withheld was delivered on the call, and it is a raise on every line. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance was raised to $12.4bn to $13.2bn, adjusted operating income to $960m to $1.15bn, end-of-year annualized run-rate revenue to $18.5bn to $19.5bn, end-of-year active power to more than 1.85 GW from more than 1.7 GW, and 2026 capital expenditure to $35bn to $39bn. Q3 guidance is revenue of $3.45bn to $3.6bn, adjusted operating income of $200m to $260m, interest expense of $860m to $940m and capex of $11.5bn to $13.5bn.
• Management committed to a specific margin trajectory. Agrawal said margins expand sequentially through Q3 and into Q4, with adjusted operating margin "reaching low teens in Q4" against 5% in Q2. Intrator framed the mechanism as scale arithmetic: each new deployment lands against a much larger installed base, so each build is a smaller share of the whole while contracted revenue from existing deployments stays in place.
• A price increase was disclosed that is not in the release. Agrawal said the Q2 operating-margin improvement "came before our July pricing changes, which included an approximately 25% increase across SKUs," taken in response to the demand environment; the company is also passing through component price increases. Intrator said contracts signed in Q2 carry contribution margins expected to be 5 to 10 percentage points above those added in recent quarters, much of it in the Vera Rubin SKU.
• Backlog conversion - the preliminary's stated blind spot - was partly quantified. Of the $104bn backlog (up 46% year over year), more than 50% is attached to a contract where customer delivery has commenced, and management expects that to exceed two thirds of the Q2 backlog by year end. No timing distribution or customer concentration was given.
• The Q2 revenue-versus-power gap was explained as linearity. Michael Turrin noted that sequential revenue was roughly flat with the prior quarter's addition despite nearly 500 MW of new active power. Agrawal said more than 300 MW came on in June alone - "June itself larger than any full quarter in our history" - so the power was back-end loaded and flows into Q3 and Q4. Construction in progress rose to $11.9bn from $9.6bn sequentially, and Q2 capex was $9.4bn, slightly above the high end of the guided range.
• Recontracting economics were made concrete with one data point. The company signed an A100 contract extending into 2029 at what management called an attractive price, on a SKU introduced in 2020. Agrawal cautioned that capacity actually coming up for renewal is "a very limited part of our fleet," and that older-generation ASPs remain at or above levels seen about a year ago. Near-term capacity is "effectively sold out," including prior generations.
• The managed inference ramp was sized and given a target. The platform went from $1m to more than $100m of run rate within a single quarter, with growth "constrained only by our near-term capacity," and management expects to exit 2026 with at least $250m of managed inference run rate. Separately, non-GPU products - storage, CPU, networking and software - already exceed $400m of ARR.
• The capital structure was detailed well beyond the release. Approximately $18bn raised in Q2 across debt, convertibles and equity; over $32bn of debt and equity capital secured to date; more than $6.9bn of cash, equivalents, restricted cash and marketable securities at 2026-06-30. The weighted average cost of debt has fallen almost 300 basis points over the past year, worth roughly $1.1bn of annualized interest savings on the end-of-Q2 debt load. The second publicly syndicated term loan is the first to include shorter-duration customer contracts; it priced in a dislocated credit week at full size and spreads have since retraced.
• Data-center permitting opposition was raised and dismissed as a location issue. Asked by Evercore about moratoriums, Intrator said they "are not going to impact the demand for this infrastructure. They are going to impact where this infrastructure gets built," described paying for grid upgrades so costs do not hit the rate base, and stated that "none of those numbers will be impacted by the regulatory pushback as of today."

Guidance and KPI clarification

• Contracted power reached 4.2 GW as of the call date, up from 3.7 GW at quarter end, with more than 1.5 GW of further powered-land options, more than 1 GW contracted outside the U.S. including 360 MW in Indonesia coming online in roughly eighteen months, and a reiterated target of at least 8 GW of active power by 2030. Management gave no free cash flow, net income, EPS or leverage guidance for any period.

Updated neutral analysis

• The preliminary's single largest gap is closed and the direction is up. The release contained no outlook at all, and the report said explicitly that the guide was the item most likely to move the stock. The guide arrived as a raise across revenue, adjusted operating income, exit run rate, active power and capex, with a named Q4 adjusted operating margin destination of low teens.
• The preliminary's core bearish observation - that operating leverage was not visible below adjusted EBITDA - is now answered with a forecast rather than a result. Adjusted operating income of $128m was down 36% year over year with margin at 5% against 16%, but it was up from $21m in Q1 and above the high end of the company's own guidance, and management guides it to low teens by Q4. The improvement is real sequentially; the year-over-year comparison the preliminary flagged is unchanged and was not addressed.
• Three distinct pricing tailwinds were disclosed and none of them are in the Q2 result. The ~25% July SKU price increase came after the quarter, the 5 to 10 point contribution-margin step-up applies to contracts signed in Q2 that have not yet been delivered, and the recontracting upside applies to fleet not yet rolling off. The Q2 margin inflection therefore precedes all three, which is management's point - and also means none of the three has yet been tested in reported results.
• The revenue-versus-power gap has a clean mechanical explanation that also raises the bar for Q3. More than 300 MW landing in June means Q2 revenue reflects almost none of the quarter's power growth, and Q3 guidance of $3.45bn to $3.6bn implies roughly 34% to 40% sequential growth. That is the first checkable test of the linearity explanation.
• Capital intensity rose alongside the guide rather than moderating. 2026 capex guided to $35bn to $39bn against Q2 capex of $9.4bn and Q3 guided to $11.5bn to $13.5bn, with Q3 interest expense alone guided to $860m to $940m against $640m in Q2. The preliminary's point that funding runs far ahead of internal cash generation stands, and the raised capex guide extends it. The offsetting disclosure is a ~300 basis point reduction in weighted average cost of debt worth roughly $1.1bn annualized.
• The backlog is better characterized but still not decomposed. More than half attached to contracts with delivery commenced, rising to over two thirds by year end, is a genuine advance on the release. Customer concentration, timing distribution and the conversion assumption behind the company-defined measure remain undisclosed, exactly as the preliminary noted.
• The new margin-mix businesses are small but disclosed for the first time. Managed inference at more than $100m of run rate targeting at least $250m by year end, and non-GPU services above $400m of ARR, sit against a $12.4bn to $13.2bn revenue guide. Management describes both as higher-margin and capacity-constrained; neither is separately margin-quantified.
• Regulatory risk was answered qualitatively and absorbed into the guide. Management stated the guided numbers are unaffected by permitting pushback as of today. That is an assertion about the present, not a quantification of exposure, and no site-level or megawatt-level sensitivity was given.

Market context and limitations

• API Ninjas price snapshot for CRWV: $90.32 on NASDAQ, timestamped 2026-08-11T22:16:30Z, roughly 18:16 Eastern. That is the identical price the preliminary recorded at 20:20:53Z, and this later print reports volume of 0 against 29,581,984 earlier, so it is a stale or carried-forward quote. No post-call or after-hours reaction is characterized here.
• The complete transcript for event 662772 was read: 77 of 77 paragraphs, approximately 52,900 characters of speaker text, with available=true and isLive=false confirming a finished call. Prepared remarks and the full Q&A are covered. The preliminary was written before the call and used none of this content.
• This transcript carries visible automatic-speech-recognition errors, including the quarter rendered as "second quarter 2020", a garbled exit run-rate sentence ("18.5 to 19.9, 19.5 for 2026") where the surrounding context and the analyst's question establish $18.5bn to $19.5bn for 2026, "IRR" for run-rate revenue, "SIP" for construction in progress, "Descartes" for the Decart product referenced with Oasis 3, and "DDT 5.5" / "5.5" for the delayed-draw term loan. Only figures consistent with the release, or restated a second way on the call, are used above; nothing was inferred from a garbled passage. The supply partner rendered as "Solidum" is recorded here as uncertain and is not relied on.
• Every scorecard actual continues to come from Quartr earnings release document 3684211 as read for the preliminary. No new estimate retrieval was performed for this stage and no figure in the scorecard was revised.
• Slide deck 4004574 remains attached to this event and was not read for either stage. Any figure presented only on a slide is not reflected here.
• The Q3 sequential growth range of roughly 34% to 40% cited above is this desk's arithmetic on the company's own guided range against reported Q2 revenue; it is not a company-stated figure.
• Figures management rounded differently from the release are not adopted as new data: revenue of "$2.6 billion" against $2,575m and adjusted EBITDA of "$1.5 billion" against $1,510m. Both are consistent roundings.
• Customer names, competitive claims, the Signal 65 total-cost-of-ownership estimate, the Gartner Magic Quadrant placement and the characterization of credit-market conditions are management's statements on the call, recorded as such and not independently verified. Company-defined measures - revenue backlog, contracted power, annualized run-rate revenue and adjusted operating income - carry the company's own definitions and are not reconciled here beyond the release's disclosed bridges.