CoreWeave Signs Higher-Priced AI Compute Deals at $40 Million Per Megawatt

Oracle Corporation reported on September 10 that its revenue rose 30% in the fiscal first quarter, driven by a 121% jump in cloud infrastructure revenue, the business that rents computing power to AI companies. The company said its remaining performance obligations, the value of contracts signed but not yet delivered, reached $664 billion, more than seven times the revenue it expects this year, and on the back of that backlog Oracle raised its full-year revenue outlook to at least $90 billion. Roughly half of the backlog should turn into revenue within three years, more than three times what the company expects to collect in the whole of this year, and Oracle signed more than $30 billion of new AI cloud deals in the quarter, most structured as prepayments or customers bringing their own hardware. Delivering that backlog is costly: Oracle spent $28.5 billion on data centers and equipment in a single quarter, more than the cash its business generated, free cash flow stayed negative, gross margin fell more than five points to 61%, and a day after the results the company expanded its job-cut plan. Concentration risk looms as well, since a $300 billion contract with OpenAI signed last year begins in 2027 and is close to half of the current backlog, while OpenAI is still losing money. Management has pointed to an investor day in October for a fuller plan on margins and cash flow ahead of the next quarterly report in December.

Cerebras Systems announced on September 1 a new AI data center in Mikkeli, Finland, built with partner Compute Nordic Finland, that will grow in stages to 165 MW of contracted capacity, with construction on the first 50 MW already under way. The deal runs through a series of service orders, each with a seven-year term, stepping up from 50 MW to 80 MW and eventually 165 MW, and an independent study dated September 12, 2025 put the eventual regional investment at €1.0 billion to €1.7 billion. Cerebras reported on August 12 that cloud revenue for the quarter ended June 30 rose 281% from a year earlier, with $25.4 billion in customer obligations still to be delivered, while core gross margin reached 41%, roughly 940 basis points above a year earlier. On a GAAP basis, second-quarter gross margin was 14% and operating margin was negative 265%, and even the core measure that strips out stock compensation, warrant amortization and pass-through data center costs showed an operating margin of negative 16%. For the third quarter, Cerebras guided to core operating margin between negative 25% and negative 23% on core revenue of $214 million to $216 million, while hedge fund ownership rose from zero funds to 78 and short interest sits at 11.88% of the float.