分析师：CoreWeave运营利润率改善但仍难覆盖高成本

Every time we talk. I mean, I'm always curious about these kind of, uh. Uh, you know, these neo clouds, uh, and weather, kind of these sort of ancillary players in the hyper scalar space are actually legit. When you look at these numbers today, does it give you a little bit more sense of proof of life or what? It's incrementally positive. There is still a really big question about whether we even need neo clouds, whether they're a good business.

And the base of it is, are they getting a good enough return on investment to pay for the very expensive capital that they have to borrow? And I think that what investors are seeing today is they took a small step in the right direction for operating margins, which were only 1% last quarter. Oh, now 5%. So that's not a lot. That's still means a 1% return on invested capital. But it's a it's a step in the right direction.

So a step in the right direction. Is it a durable step a long term step goal. Or is this just you know, they're taking advantage of what right now is it's kind of a crazy market. Uh, Let's put it in perspective. So if I'm saying they're getting about a 1% return on assets, their borrowing costs has actually just gone up. It was closer to 8% and now it's close to 10%. So you're borrowing at 10% to get a 1% return. That's not good news.

So again they have to improve the returns very significantly. And that's to reduce the cost of capital which recently has actually gone the wrong way. That's why we're questioning the whole category is that this is like borrowing on margin to buy treasuries. Borrowing at 10% to buy a 5% return isn't a good idea. And for these guys, again, they're still getting a 1% return. So until and they're in a 10 billion revenue run rate scale.

So it's not like there's a tiny upstart and they're still generating pretty low returns on that. Slightly better than before but still not good enough to justify their existence. Well, what do you make of kind of the splashy announcement that Jensen Wang made yesterday. The idea of trying to raise what is effectively a $500 billion, uh, financing pool, if you will, for presumably those folks who are going to be buying its chips.

But the idea is that some of these companies that are dealing with the higher cost of capital, or maybe no access at all, would potentially have access. Does that not help? Or we've or is this just basically you're still paying the same cost of capital, just maybe to a different set of, uh, separate, uh, set of lenders? That is exactly what Jensen's trying to do. And he's seeing colleagues have to borrow at 10%. And he said, I need to do something about this.

And so if I guarantee some of these loans, I can reduce the cost of capital for companies like quarterly. So he is trying to help them. The price is, of course, that you can only buy Nvidia chips. So he's not doing it out of the generosity of his heart. No, he's doing it so he can see the whole ecosystem with capital that's tied to buying Nvidia chips, not Broadcom chips, not AMD chips, not ones made by Intel but Nvidia chips.

And so he's getting something for that backstop. The backstop though is a financial commitment. If these data centers fail. The loan goes back to Nvidia. So there is a cost at least down the line for them making this type of guarantee. But for now they have $60 billion of net cash. They're going to generate 200 billion in the next 12 months. He needs to do something with that cash. And guaranteeing his customers love seems to be a good way for him to make sure that they keep buying Nvidia and don't buy anything else.

So with this core, we've I mean, one of the big questions and that you and a lot of other analysts raised was also this idea of of who their customers are and whether it will be able to diversify, obviously, at least in the most recent quarter, uh, still heavily dependent on Microsoft. Uh, and it's honestly a couple of the hyperscalers. And I guess my question to you is, why does a Microsoft need a Needle core weave.

Why does a meta need a core we. Why does alphabet? Need a core weave or any of its or any of those other Neo Cloud competitors? So the reason Microsoft is, has a three part strategy is that they don't want to build it all themselves. If they build it all themselves, they're taking a risk that they overbuilt. So they're building some infrastructure, they're leasing other infrastructure, and then they're leasing compute from companies like Core Wave and reselling it to their customers.

They're the ones that have the customers, and that's why they want to make sure they can meet demand without over investing. And core Wave is a tool to do that. The problem with being a tool is that once you use the tool for, let's say, the next 3 to 5 years, by then Microsoft believes they will have enough capacity to serve all their customers, or they're going to need a core wave is going to need core wave when they're done building out their own infrastructure.

So this is great for Microsoft and meta for core. We've shareholders. There may be a ticking time clock.