“Short-term upside is limited!” Barclays downgraded CoreWeave (CRWV.US) to “wait and see”

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Barclays Bank downgraded CoreWeave (CRWV.US)'s rating from “increase holdings” to “hold and wait and see”, saying that although it is optimistic about the stock for a long time, there is limited room for short-term growth.

Analyst Lenschow (Lenschow) pointed out, “At current levels, the multiple of CoreWeave's corporate value and 2026 profit before interest and tax (EV/EBIT) is 41 times (assuming a total debt of about US$31.4 billion in 2026). Although we expect its growth to remain strong, it is uncertain whether there are fundamental factors that will drive the stock price to rise even further, as the company's current valuation is significantly higher than that of other companies in the industry.”

However, the brokerage firm stressed that the value of CoreWeave as the first batch of pure generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) software targets should not be underestimated.

Barclays stated, “The company's business covers a huge potential market (TAM) for training and inference workloads, and we continue to be optimistic about its strong growth opportunities in the short to medium term — revenue growth of 420% year-on-year in the first quarter confirms its good momentum.”

Since this year, CRWV's stock price has soared by more than 156%, and its performance far exceeds the S&P 500 index, which fell 1.34% during the same period. Earlier, after the cloud service provider announced a $4 billion cooperation agreement with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Citi (Citi) also raised its target price from $43 to $94.

However, analysts at Seeking Alpha were wary of the stock, rating it “hold,” while Wall Street analysts were more optimistic and rated it “buy.”