GPU as a service economics: revenue, backlog, debt and margins

A GPU cloud, sometimes called a neocloud, buys chips, racks them in rented or built data centers, and rents the compute out, mostly on multi-year take-or-pay contracts. Revenue is growing very fast, but borrowing costs and hardware depreciation absorb most of the operating profit. The business is a financing machine as much as a technology one.

This article walks through how that model works, using the companies' own filings and releases: CoreWeave's second quarter 2026 results and its 2025 annual report, and Nebius's second quarter 2026 shareholder letter. Every figure carries its source and date. Nothing here is investment advice, and nothing here is a prediction.

Key numbers at a glance

• CoreWeave revenue, Q2 2026 (quarter ended 30 June 2026): $2,575 million, against $1,212 million in Q2 2025. Company release, 11 August 2026.
• CoreWeave revenue, full year 2025: $5,131 million, up 168% from $1,915 million in 2024. Annual report (Form 10-K).
• CoreWeave revenue backlog at 30 June 2026: approximately $104 billion, which excludes more than $25 billion of new customer commitments the company says it added in early Q3. Company release.
• CoreWeave adjusted EBITDA, Q2 2026: $1,510 million, a 59% margin. Company release (a non-GAAP measure, explained below).
• CoreWeave adjusted operating income, Q2 2026: $128 million, a 5% margin, against 16% a year earlier. Company release.
• CoreWeave GAAP operating loss, Q2 2026: $49 million, and net loss $626 million. Company release.
• CoreWeave net interest expense, Q2 2026: $640 million, against $267 million a year earlier. Company release.
• CoreWeave debt at 30 June 2026: about $35.1 billion across recourse and non-recourse debt (a sum of the release's recourse and non-recourse balance sheet lines, excluding leases), against about $21.4 billion at 31 December 2025. The 10-K reports $21.6 billion total debt at year end 2025, so the two sources differ slightly on that date because they define the total differently.
• CoreWeave purchases of property and equipment, Q2 2026: $6,422 million. Company release.
• CoreWeave power: about 1.5 GW active and about 3.7 GW contracted at the Q2 2026 date. Company release.
• Share of CoreWeave 2025 revenue from its top customer (Microsoft): about 67%. Annual report.
• Share of CoreWeave 2025 revenue from committed (take-or-pay) contracts: over 98%. Annual report.
• Nebius revenue, Q2 2026: $582.3 million, up 454% year on year. Shareholder letter, 12 August 2026.
• Nebius annualized run rate revenue (ARR) at end of June 2026: $3.0 billion, up from $1.9 billion at end of March 2026. Shareholder letter.
• Nebius adjusted EBITDA, Q2 2026: $236.2 million, a 41% margin for the group. Shareholder letter.

What a GPU cloud actually sells

A graphics processing unit, or GPU, is the chip that does most of the arithmetic for training and running AI models. A single modern server holds eight of them and costs a very large amount of money. Most AI developers do not want to buy that hardware, wait for delivery, find power and cooling, and then run it. They rent it by the GPU-hour instead.

A GPU cloud does three jobs. It buys the chips and servers. It secures a building with enough electrical power and cooling, either by leasing or building. And it runs software that lets customers use the machines, with networking fast enough to link thousands of GPUs together. The product is compute capacity that works reliably, not just chips in a box.

Two quantities matter more than any others in this business. The first is power, measured in megawatts or gigawatts, because a data center can only host as many chips as its electrical supply can feed. CoreWeave reported about 1.5 GW of active power and about 3.7 GW contracted in its Q2 2026 release. Active means switched on and serving customers. Contracted means secured but not yet all delivered. The second is the price per GPU-hour, covered in GPU rental prices in 2026.

How the contracts are written

This is the part that surprises most newcomers. The headline numbers are not mostly walk-up rentals.

CoreWeave's 2025 annual report describes two ways customers buy: committed contracts, which are take-or-pay, and on-demand, which is pay-as-you-go. Take-or-pay means the customer agrees to pay for a set amount of capacity over the contract term whether or not it uses all of it. The filing says committed contracts were over 98% of revenue in 2025, 96% in 2024 and 88% in 2023.

The same filing says the weighted-average duration of committed contracts was approximately five years at 31 December 2025, and that the weighted-average prepayment across active contracts was 15% to 25% of total contract value (TCV). A prepayment is cash the customer pays before the capacity is delivered, which helps the provider fund the hardware purchase.

The filing also says the company primarily finances its infrastructure through asset-level debt supported by take-or-pay customer contracts. In plain words, a lender looks at a signed multi-year contract with a strong customer and lends against it, using the GPUs as security. That is why the contract terms and the customer's credit quality matter as much as the technology.

Nebius's Q2 2026 shareholder letter, dated 12 August 2026, describes a similar pattern. It says customer commitments were over $40 billion as of the letter date and that it expects over $9 billion of customer prepayments in 2026. Both figures are company statements, and the second is an expectation, not a result.

Revenue and backlog

CoreWeave's revenue grew from $1,212 million in Q2 2025 to $2,575 million in Q2 2026, which is a bit more than double. Its six month revenue was $4,653 million against $2,194 million a year earlier. All of this is from the company's own release.

Backlog is the dollar value of contracted revenue not yet recognized. The company put it at approximately $104 billion at 30 June 2026. For scale, take Q2 revenue of $2,575 million and multiply by four to get an annualized pace of about $10.3 billion. The backlog is then roughly ten times that pace. That ratio is simple arithmetic on the company's figures, not a company figure, and it is only a rough guide, because the backlog is delivered over several years while revenue depends on how fast new capacity comes online.

The 10-K gives an earlier snapshot: $60.7 billion of remaining performance obligations at 31 December 2025, up from $15.1 billion a year earlier. The filing also warns that this number should be expected to grow in steps, and that it may include periods of decline rather than rising smoothly. A backlog can fall when a large contract is worked off faster than new ones are signed.

Nebius reports ARR instead of backlog. Its group revenue was $582.3 million in Q2 2026 and ARR reached $3.0 billion at the end of June, up 598% year on year according to the letter. ARR is a run rate: it takes a recent period of revenue and annualizes it. It is a useful signal of momentum, but it is not the same thing as contracted revenue.

Customer concentration

CoreWeave's annual report says approximately 67% of its 2025 revenue came from its top customer, Microsoft. It also says approximately 77% of 2024 revenue came from its top two customers. The filing describes OpenAI and Meta as large customers too. The filing says OpenAI committed to pay up to approximately $11.9 billion through October 2030 and, in another passage, up to approximately $6.5 billion through May 2031. Those passages do not make clear whether the two are separate or overlapping commitments, so they are not added together here. The Meta text says it initially committed to pay up to approximately $14.2 billion through December 2031.

The Q2 2026 release lists new customers including Bentley Systems, Caterpillar, Grammarly, Isomorphic Labs and Sunday Robotics, and expanded relationships with several others including Databricks and Runway ML. It does not give a revenue split, so the release does not show how concentration has changed in 2026.

Concentration matters because a take-or-pay contract is only as good as the customer behind it. A lender will ask who pays, for how long, and what happens if that customer's own business changes.

Margins: three ways to measure the same company

CoreWeave's Q2 2026 release shows how much the answer depends on which margin you pick.

• Adjusted EBITDA: $1,510 million, a 59% margin (62% a year earlier). EBITDA means earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. "Adjusted" removes some further items the company chooses. It is a non-GAAP measure, meaning it is not defined by standard accounting rules.
• Adjusted operating income: $128 million, a 5% margin (16% a year earlier). This takes depreciation back in.
• GAAP operating loss: $49 million, a negative 2% margin, against a 2% profit a year earlier.

The gap between the first two, about $1.4 billion in a single quarter, is depreciation and amortization. The release's reconciliation table lists depreciation and amortization of $1,393 million for the quarter, of which $11 million is amortization of acquired intangibles that the company adds back to reach adjusted operating income. That leaves about $1,382 million, which matches the gap between the two adjusted figures. Depreciation is the accounting charge for hardware wearing out and losing value over its assumed life. The same table shows $165 million of stock-based compensation added back in both adjusted measures, which is one reason adjusted figures run above GAAP ones. The point for a customer or an observer is simple: a GPU cloud can show an EBITDA margin near 60% and an operating margin near zero in the same quarter, because the hardware is very expensive and is written off over years.

Below the operating line sits interest. Net interest expense was $640 million in Q2 2026, which is about 25% of the quarter's revenue on simple arithmetic from the release. The net loss of $626 million is close to that interest bill. In other words, in this quarter the company's operating result was roughly break-even and the borrowing cost produced the loss.

Nebius shows a different shape. Its group adjusted EBITDA was $236.2 million (41% margin) in Q2 2026, and its AI cloud unit alone was $285.7 million, a 49.7% margin. The group figure is lower because other early stage businesses are included. Nebius is also earlier in its build and the letter reports about $5.7 billion of capital spending in the quarter, mainly GPUs, related hardware and data center expansion. The two companies' profitability cannot be compared directly, because they have different mixes of capacity, customers and accounting choices.

Debt: how the build is paid for

CoreWeave's balance sheet at 30 June 2026 shows recourse debt of about $31.4 billion and non-recourse debt of about $3.7 billion, which sums to about $35.1 billion excluding leases. Recourse debt means the lender can claim against the company itself. Non-recourse debt is secured only on specific assets, such as a given set of GPUs and the contract attached to them. The release says the company raised more than $10 billion of unsecured debt and convertible bonds in the quarter and announced a $3.1 billion term loan it describes as the first publicly syndicated delayed draw facility backed by HPC infrastructure. It also reports $997 million from private placements of equity and a $1 billion strategic investment from Jane Street, and cash of $5,524 million.

The 10-K gives interest rates on some earlier instruments: 9.25% on 2030 notes, 9.00% on 2031 senior notes and 1.75% on 2031 convertible notes, with the credit facilities on variable rates tied to SOFR, mostly unhedged. SOFR is a benchmark short-term interest rate, so a variable rate loan costs more if market rates rise.

Nebius reports a $775 million asset-backed secured facility at SOFR plus 2.50% in July 2026, convertible notes (amounts not stated in the letter), roughly $8 billion of cash at the end of Q2, and an at-the-market equity program under which it had sold 12.7 million Class A shares for about $2.8 billion of gross proceeds through 30 June 2026. An at-the-market program lets a company sell new shares gradually into the market.

The capital spending numbers show why financing matters. CoreWeave's property and equipment purchases were $6,422 million in the quarter, about two and a half times its revenue for the same quarter, and $14,117 million for six months. Capital spending runs ahead of revenue because the hardware is bought before it earns rent.

Why the model can work, and where it is exposed

The case for the model is straightforward. A multi-year take-or-pay contract with a creditworthy customer turns a volatile asset (chips with a fast changing price) into a predictable revenue stream. Prepayments reduce the amount to be borrowed. Lenders accept GPUs as collateral because contracts back them.

The exposure sits in a few places. Contracts and loans must line up in time: if the debt matures before the contract revenue has repaid it, the company has to refinance. Customer concentration means a few counterparties carry a lot of the risk. Hardware ages, and how long a GPU stays valuable is an assumption, not a fact. Power and construction schedules slip. And a large share of the cost is interest, so changes in borrowing costs flow straight through.

Neither company's filings cited here say what older GPU generations earn when a contract ends and is renewed, so that question is open.

What is firm and what is uncertain

Firm, because they are in company filings or releases: CoreWeave's quarterly and annual revenue, backlog, debt balances, interest expense, capital spending, customer concentration for 2025, and contract structure; Nebius's quarterly revenue, ARR, EBITDA and stated commitments.

Uncertain: how much of the $104 billion backlog arrives in each year; the true cash margin on any single GPU contract, which neither company discloses; how long GPUs will earn useful rent; and whether commitments announced after quarter end become revenue on schedule. The useful life the company assumes for its GPUs drives the size of the depreciation charge; this article makes no claim about that figure, which sits in the property and equipment note of the annual report. Where a number is the company's own non-GAAP measure, the definition is the company's choice.

What to watch next

• CoreWeave's Q3 2026 release: whether the roughly $25 billion of early Q3 commitments is reflected in backlog and how interest expense moves.
• The share of revenue from the largest customer, in the next annual report.
• Nebius's detailed guidance and how its financing mix changes as capital spending grows.
• Active versus contracted power: how fast contracted capacity becomes billable capacity.
• Whether new facilities are priced like the $3.1 billion HPC-backed loan, and at what interest rate.

For related reading, see Anthropic compute commitments explained, OpenAI compute commitments and Stargate and the AI chip market in 2026.

If your own team runs AI workloads on rented GPUs, the software you load onto them still needs inventory and scanning. Safeguard offers SBOM and dependency scanning and a free scan at gold.safeguard.sh/scan.

Quick check

Sources

• CoreWeave second quarter 2026 results, investors.coreweave.com, 11 August 2026
• CoreWeave Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025, SEC EDGAR
• Nebius Group second quarter 2026 shareholder letter, Form 6-K exhibit, SEC EDGAR, 12 August 2026

Company figures are as reported by the companies. Non-GAAP measures are the companies' own definitions. Totals and ratios described as arithmetic are sums or ratios of reported lines.

Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.