Two Order Books, Two Funding Machines
CoreWeave reported second-quarter results on August 11 and Nebius on August 12, 2026. The two order books look alike. The funding machines behind them run in opposite directions.
Revenue compares Q2 2026 with Q2 2025. Debt is gross principal at June 30, 2026; convertible notes, which convert to shares above set prices and are often read as quasi-equity, are shown separately. The Nebius figure is its secured facility raised in July, after quarter end.
CoreWeave’s falling line is a denominator story: its prepayments grew about five-fold from the end of 2023 while its borrowings grew more than twenty-fold. Nebius’s rising line is the numerator: prepayments growing faster than the debt beneath them.
Chart notes
- Computed: total deferred revenue divided by the carrying value of total debt, current plus non-current, at each period end. Hover any point for the filed inputs.
- Nebius is drawn from June 2025; before that its debt was near nil and the ratio is not meaningful.
- Both series print 38% at December 31, 2025, where the lines cross.
- CoreWeave's June 2026 denominator is the four balance-sheet debt lines summed, $35.1 billion net carrying value.
- Total debt is borrowings at net carrying value and excludes lease liabilities, which both companies report separately under ASC 842: $16.5B at CoreWeave and $1.5B non-current at Nebius at June 30, 2026. Including leases moves the pair from 28% / 70% to about 19% / 59% [computed; Nebius does not separately disclose its current lease portion, so its adjusted figure is slightly understated]. The ordering does not change.
01 The Guidance Layer
Nebius wrote that it is "reaffirming our full-year 2026 guidance across all metrics" and raised its year-end contracted-power guide from more than 4 GW to 5 GW.1 CoreWeave raised its full-year revenue guide and its capital expenditure (capex) guide.2 A year ago both companies guided far lower. The table shows the same measures twelve months apart.
| August 2025 | August 2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave full-year revenue guide2 | $5.15–5.35B (FY25) | $12.4–13.2B (FY26) | ~2.4× |
| CoreWeave capex guide2 | $20–23B (FY25) | $35–39B (FY26) | ~1.7× |
| CoreWeave Q2 revenue | $1.2B | $2.6B | 2.1× |
| Nebius year-end ARR guide | $0.9–1.1B (YE25) | $7–9B (YE26) | ~8× |
| Nebius Q2 revenue | $105.1M | $582.3M | 5.5× |
| Nebius contracted-power guide1 | >1 GW (YE25) | 5 GW (YE26) | ~5× |
ARR is annual recurring revenue. Change column compares range midpoints; the power row compares stated floors. Guide sources and dates are in Sources & method.
02 The Cash Evidence
Both figures come from balance sheets on EDGAR, dated June 30, 2026. CoreWeave's 10-Q, filed August 12, puts deferred revenue at $9.7 billion, up from $8.2 billion at year-end. Nebius reports $6.0 billion, split $1.0 billion current and $5.0 billion non-current, up from $1.6 billion at year-end 2025. Deferred revenue here is cash customers have already paid for compute not yet delivered.
The Nebius balance now stands at about 70% of its $8.5 billion debt stack. Customers fund its buildout at nearly the scale lenders do.
Chart notes
- Total deferred revenue, current plus non-current, at each period end. Hover any point for the dated figure and its filing.
- CoreWeave's 2023 and 2024 marks are year-end prints from the 424B4 prospectus; quarterly from Q1 2025.
- Nebius reported a single near-zero line through Q3 2025, mostly its edtech business, so its series is drawn as steps between reported balances.
03 The Contract Evidence · CoreWeave
The August 11 call supplied the contract side.2 The chief financial officer cited an "approximately 25% increase across SKUs" in July. A SKU here is a listed product configuration. That is contract pricing.
The call also described "an A100 contract that extends into 2029."2 That is a 2020 chip taking new multi-year commitments, with old-generation average selling prices (ASP) at or above a year ago. What the chip itself trades for sits on our hardware record.
Contract prices themselves are never published. What they earn is still measurable. We reconstruct each operator's realized dollars per GPU-hour from its filings, quarter by quarter, on Realized vs. Rate Card. The July repricing came after the June quarter closed. Its first measurable print is the September quarter.
04 The Contract Evidence · Nebius
Nebius's second-quarter shareholder letter reports "four landmark deals" at "an average total contract value (TCV) of more than $1 billion each, and a yield of $20-25 million per megawatt." Two are named, Reflection and Cohere. The letter describes the other two only as a US AI lab and a US quantitative trading firm. "TCV of Q2 wins grew nearly 4x quarter-over-quarter."
The prepay terms are stated as deal economics: "70% of deals including prepayments, covering 50-60% of the associated capex," with an expected payback of "1 year and 10 months, down from our two-to-three year payback period previously."3 The letter also reports "more than 30% higher pricing on older-generation GPUs versus Q1," which pairs with CoreWeave's old-generation ASP line. Both books are repricing old silicon upward. Nebius presents its deal yields as a ladder; the chart below shows it in annual contract value (ACV) per megawatt.
The August 12 call put those numbers into a deal architecture. Arkady Volozh, the chief executive, described three types. Mid-term contracts of one to three years are the core, at "a yield of $20 million-$25 million per megawatt."4 The second type is "shorter-duration capacity, typically for up to six months," for customers "ready to pay a significant premium": "We are negotiating deals for $40 million-$50 million per megawatt range, and sometimes above."4 Marc Boroditsky, the chief revenue officer, said the company is "deliberately allocating a portion of capacity for short-term and immediate needs because that is where we currently see the highest potential for combined realized value."4 The third type is "long-term contracts with investment-grade customers." Volozh said they "help us to finance our build-out faster and more efficiently," and that "with $40 billion in contracted backlog, we will do more of this."4 How much capacity sits in each book is not disclosed. Six months is also not the short end of this market. SpaceX’s largest compute agreement can be exited on ninety days’ notice, the fully price-exposed end of the same spectrum. We read that book in The Nearer Frontier.
Chart notes
- From the infographic in the letter of August 12, 2026, which states "all numbers are approximate," on a revenue-recognition basis excluding any prepayment.
- The two upper steps are floors: the letter gives "more than $20 million" for Q2 deals and a "$40-50 million per MW range" for Q3 short-term capacity, with the first such deal signed the week of the letter.
- The dashed whisker marks a stated floor, not a measured top.
05 The Scale of the Demand
Nebius states the scale plainly. The strongest single line in the letter:
"We could sell our entire 2027 capacity on these terms today. We are deliberately not doing so because we see higher value in retaining some capacity for immediate customer needs."
The letter counts "more than $40 billion of customer commitments." Four billion-dollar deals in one quarter, and a new short-term lane at "$40-50 million per MW," signed first the week of the letter. On the call, Boroditsky said a pilot capacity auction for Blackwell chips cleared "15% higher than we have ever seen before, and 20% higher than our pipeline for Blackwells."4 On its own ladder, the shortest commitments carry the highest per-megawatt prices.
CoreWeave's account matches.2 Management described near-term capacity as "effectively sold out" and said it expects "demand to meaningfully exceed supply for years." Backlog stood at $104 billion at June 30 on the company's own definition, which adds estimates of future payments to remaining performance obligations (RPO).5 RPO is contracted revenue not yet delivered. The 10-Q filed August 12 tags RPO itself at $103.7 billion. The call described "over $25 billion of net new customer commitments added in the early weeks of Q3," and booked ARR for its managed inference platform growing from $1 million to more than $100 million since launch. July's repricing of approximately 25% across SKUs is the price leg of the same book.
What follows is our reading of those disclosures, not a company claim. A rising order book alone is ambiguous, because backlogs grow in balanced markets too. Here both order books rise while unit prices rise across every tenor, and the shortest commitments carry the highest per-megawatt prices. That combination is the signature of demand outrunning supply. Both managements say so in their own words. The prices behave as if they are right.
06 The Funding Split
Same demand, two opposite machines. The cost of the two machines shows on the income statement. CoreWeave’s interest expense reached $640 million in the second quarter, up from $267 million a year earlier. That is an annualized run rate near $2.6 billion against the 9 to 15 percent paper above. The coupons on Nebius’s convertible notes run 1.00 to 3.00 percent. Scaled to revenue, the two stacks sit at nearly the same altitude: each company carries roughly fourteen quarters of revenue in debt [computed]. What differs is construction, not scale.
The borrowing side shows the split in one view: what each company owes at June 30, and what is pledged against it. CoreWeave's largest block is its delayed draw term loan (DDTL) facilities: loans drawn in tranches as contracts are pledged.
Chart notes
- CoreWeave segments are gross principal from the 10-Q debt schedule, $35,551M ($35,068M net of discounts and issuance costs). Nebius is the carrying value, $8,545.7M, against about $8,500M of original principal; the difference is accretion on the June 2025 notes, which accrete to 120% and 125% of principal at maturity. Hover any segment for the instrument detail.
- CoreWeave DDTL detail (gross drawn, effective rate, maturity): 1.0 $1,300M 15% Mar 2028 · 2.0 $3,190M 11% Aug 2030 · 2.1 $3,000M 9% Mar 2031 · 3.0 $2,215M 9% Aug 2030 · 5.0 $1,101M 9% Nov 2031 (SOFR + 4.50%, $3.1B facility) · 4.0 $2,837M 7% Mar 2032 (SOFR + 2.25% floating / Treasury + 2.00% fixed, $8.5B facility, non-recourse). The 10-Q describes the DDTLs as "collateralized with the assets underlying the contributed contracts and the pledged contractual cash flows"; the bankruptcy-remote borrower entities held $18.2B of non-current and $2.6B of current pledged assets at June 30, plus $3.3B and $155M at the DDTL 4.0 borrower.
- CoreWeave senior notes and converts are stated "unsecured obligations." The senior secured revolver ($2.5B capacity) was undrawn at June 30 and is not a bar segment. Vendor financing (OEM and software license, $5,102M) and the MagAI deposit obligation ($189M) carry no stated collateral in the filing, so they are drawn as their own class.
- Computed secured shares: CoreWeave $13,643M DDTLs ÷ $35,551M gross = 38% (39% of net). If vendor financing were treated as equipment-secured the share would be 53%; the filing does not say, so the lower figure is used. Nebius secured debt at June 30 was zero; $775M ÷ $8,545.7M = 9% measures the July facility against the June 30 stack.
- Nebius pre-funded warrants ($2.0B, Q1) and treasury share sales ($2.8B gross, Q2) are equity, not debt, and are not in the bar.
- Segment labels are rounded independently; the underlying figures sum to $35,551M gross.
| Instrument | Amount | Secured? | Rate where disclosed |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave · $35.6B gross · $35.1B net carrying | |||
| DDTL facilities, six (1.0–5.0) | $13.6B | Yes · GPUs and contracted cash flows | SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate) + 2.25–4.50% on 2026 facilities; eff. 7–15% |
| Senior notes, five series 2030–2032 | $10.0B | No | 8.50–9.75% coupons |
| Convertible senior notes, 2031 and 2032 | $6.6B | No | 1.75% |
| OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and software license financing | $5.1B | Not stated | eff. 9–11% |
| MagAI deposit obligation | $189M | Not stated | eff. 12% |
| Revolving credit facility ($2.5B capacity) | $0 drawn | Yes | eff. 7% |
| Nebius · $8.5B carrying at Jun 30 · all convertible notes · plus July facility | |||
| Convertible notes, Jun 2025 (due 2029, 2031) | $1.0B | No | 2.00% / 3.00% |
| Convertible notes, Sep 2025 (due 2030, 2032) | $3.2B | No | 1.00% / 2.75% |
| Convertible notes, Mar 2026 (due 2031, 2033) | $4.3B | No | 1.25% / 2.625% |
| Secured facility, raised July 2026 (post-quarter) | $775M | Yes · GPUs and contracted cash flows | SOFR + 2.50% |
CoreWeave amounts are gross principal from the 10-Q debt schedule; Nebius amounts are original principal from its convertible-notes 6-Ks, and its $8.5B carrying value adds accretion. Secured shares [computed]: 38% of CoreWeave's gross debt; 0% at Nebius at June 30, about 9% counting the July facility. Accession numbers and details in Sources & method.
CoreWeave's prepay is a standing convention. Its filings state that "the weighted-average prepayment across all our active contracts was 15% to 25% of the TCV," restated each period since the S-1. Deferred revenue grew from $2.0 billion in 2023 to $4.1 billion in 2024 to $9.7 billion at June 30, 2026. Debt compounded faster, from $1.5 billion to $35.1 billion of carrying value over the same span. So the prepay balance fell from 132% of total debt to 28%, and prepay inflow covered 40% of 2025 capex against 11% in the first half of 2026.
The 10-Q's funding sentence lists "debt and equity securities issuances, delayed draw term loan facilities, OEM financing arrangements, and cash from our balance sheet." Deferred revenue is not on the list. Prepayments appear instead under credit risk: protection against a customer failing, not a funding source. Demand becomes collateral, and the company borrows against the book.
Nebius held under $20 million of deferred revenue until Q3 2025. It then added $6.0 billion in three quarters, led by two named contracts: Microsoft, at up to $17.4 billion of committed fees with about $7.0 billion of upfront payments, and the first Meta agreement at about $2.9 billion. The filings state the use directly: "Cash flow coming from the Agreement will be utilized to finance part of the capital expenditure associated with the Agreement." The prepay balance rose from 0.4% of total debt in September 2025 to 70% at June 30. In Q1 2026 prepay inflow reached 129% of that quarter's capex, the only customer-outfunded quarter at either firm. Demand becomes cash, and customers fund the buildout directly.
Chart notes
- Computed: change in total deferred revenue during the quarter, divided by that quarter's purchases of property and equipment from the cash-flow statement; quarterly capex derived from year-to-date figures where the filing reports year-to-date. Hover any bar for the dollar figures.
- A negative bar means consumption of prepayments outran new inflow.
- Longer windows, same arithmetic: CoreWeave full-year 2023 67%, 2024 24%, 2025 40%, first-half 2026 11%; Nebius first-half 2026 54%.
Our Read
Two order books, two funding machines. The demand is real and in many cases paid for in advance: $9.7 billion of customer prepayments sit on one balance sheet and $6.0 billion on the other. What differs is how each company grows into that demand. The difference runs through everything above: the tenor of the book, the source of the funding, and who carries the price of compute.
The funding split carries a price position with it. Nebius says it could sell its entire 2027 capacity today and is deliberately not doing so; it is piloting capacity auctions and pricing its shortest commitments highest. That is a company pressing to capture the economic rents of today's scarcity. Nebius's short-term contracts are a position on near-term pricing, and management says so: the chief financial officer tied the decision to retain capacity to "confidence with respect to future pricing dynamics."4 The position carries the exposure both ways. The short-term book harvests the premium while scarcity holds. It is the first thing to reprice downward if demand fades, while contracts locked years ahead keep paying. What limits the exposure is not the tenor but the allocation: only a portion of capacity is held back, with the long-term investment-grade contracts beneath it. CoreWeave's chief financial officer says its economics "do not rely on recontracting after initial customer term," on what it calls a typical five-year contract.2 Both companies pledge the same collateral when they borrow: GPUs and the contracts on them. Nebius's first secured facility is backed by "deployed GPU infrastructure and contracted cash flows," the same recipe as CoreWeave's. The difference is share, not kind: that facility is about 9% of Nebius's debt [computed: $775M of $8.5B], while borrowing against the book is CoreWeave's primary machine. One order book is built to harvest the current price of compute; the other is built, above all, to be borrowed against.
Both order books meet in one number: what a deployed GPU-hour actually earns. Realized vs. Rate Card reconstructs that number from the filings each quarter, for both companies, against their own published prices. The June quarter is live there now.
Footnotes
- A year-end 2026 guide, not a measurement. The letter prints no second-quarter actual for contracted power. The latest stated actual remains more than 3.5 GW, given at Q1 2026.
- CoreWeave call quotes and call-sourced figures, including the full-year 2026 revenue and capex guides, the commitment additions since quarter-end, and the inference-ARR figure, are verified against the corrected transcript of the August 11, 2026 call posted on CoreWeave's investor site. The year-ago full-year 2025 guide is also call-sourced: the written Q2 2025 release deferred guidance to the call, and the quote here is from the corrected transcript of the August 12, 2025 call posted on CoreWeave's investor site.
- Company estimate. The letter footnotes the payback as based on forecast costs and contracted future capacity, "including capacity not yet built."
- Nebius call quotes are verified against two independent transcripts of the August 12, 2026 earnings call; the company had not posted an official replay at publication. Nebius shareholder-letter quotes are checked against the EDGAR exhibit.
- RPO is remaining performance obligations, the contracted revenue not yet delivered. Backlog definitions are not comparable across companies. CoreWeave's $104 billion is its own construction, RPO plus estimates of future payments. Read orderings across issuers, never ratios. The filed RPO figure is $103.7 billion at June 30, 2026.
Sources & Method
CoreWeave figures are from its 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (filed 2026-08-12, EDGAR accession 0001769628-26-000366; the debt composition is its Note 10 instrument schedule and narrative), its 10-K for 2025 (filed 2026-03-02), the quarterly 10-Qs of 2025, and the 424B4 prospectus of 2025-03-31, which carries the 2023 and 2024 balance sheets. CoreWeave's Q2 2025 revenue is from the earnings press release furnished as Exhibit 99.1 to its 8-K filed 2025-08-12; its year-ago full-year 2025 guide is from the corrected transcript of the August 12, 2025 earnings call posted on the company's investor site (see footnote 2). Nebius figures are from its results exhibits furnished on Form 6-K, including the Q2 2026 press release and shareholder letter filed 2026-08-12 (accession 0001104659-26-094568), the Q2 2025 press release and shareholder letter filed 2025-08-07, the Q4 2025 shareholder letter filed 2026-02-12, the Q1 2026 shareholder letter filed 2026-05-13, its interim financial statements, and its 20-F annual reports; Nebius is a foreign private issuer and files no 10-Qs. The Nebius convertible-notes terms are from its offering 6-Ks: the June 2025 private placement (6-K filed 2025-06-05, accession 0001104659-25-056817), the September 2025 offering (terms 6-K filed 2025-09-11; closing 6-K filed 2025-09-15, accession 0001104659-25-089969), and the March 2026 offering (terms 6-K filed 2026-03-18; closing 6-K filed 2026-03-20, accession 0001104659-26-032735). The $775M July secured facility is from the Q2 2026 shareholder letter. Letter quotes were checked verbatim against the EDGAR exhibits. All ratios shown as computed are calculated by CCIR from those filings, not company disclosures, and each chart's hover text carries the inputs.
Data notes. Nebius's December 2024 deferred revenue prints as $16.5M in contemporaneous releases and $16.3M in later comparative columns after the Toloka deconsolidation; we use the contemporaneous figure. CoreWeave's June 2026 balance sheet splits debt into four recourse and non-recourse lines; the total here sums them, $35,068M net carrying value against $35,551M gross principal. CoreWeave's FY2024 cash-flow deferred-revenue change (+$2,049M) differs from the balance delta (+$2,059M) by acquisition effects. CoreWeave's RPO priors, for reference, are XBRL-tagged filed figures: $60.7B at December 31, 2025 (10-K) and $98.8B at March 31, 2026 (Q1 10-Q). The year-over-year guidance multiples in section 1 use range midpoints: $12.8B ÷ $5.25B = 2.4x and $8.0B ÷ $1.0B = 8x; the quarter multiple is $2,575M ÷ $1,212.8M = 2.1x. Debt-composition notes: CoreWeave's schedule ties as $31,832M recourse plus $3,719M non-recourse gross, less $483M of discounts and issuance costs, to $35,068M net; the DDTL group in section 6 sums $1,300M + $3,190M + $3,000M + $2,215M + $1,101M + $2,837M = $13,643M, matching the MD&A's "$13.6 billion outstanding under our delayed draw term loan facilities." The secured-share bounds reflect that the 10-Q does not state a collateral pledge for the OEM and software license financing. Nebius's September 2025 convert series are disclosed only as "approximately $1.58 billion" per series (~$3.16B total); its June 2025 notes accrete to 120% and 125% of principal at maturity, which is why the $8,545.7M carrying value exceeds the ~$8,500M of original principal; the March 2026 $262.5M overallotment on the 2033 notes was not exercised (second-quarter convert proceeds are nil in the cash flow statement). The $775M secured facility was raised in July 2026 and is therefore not in the June 30 debt balance. Page prose rounds to billions at one decimal; exact filed inputs stay in these notes and in the chart hover text. Research notes are dated, not updated in place.