Nvidia, CoreWeave, and Nebius: Inside the Circular Financing of the GPU Boom
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- Microsoft and Meta have committed up to $122.2 billion to CoreWeave and Nebius — roughly 90% of AWS's trailing-twelve-month revenue — while CoreWeave's FY2026 estimated revenue is $12.6B and Nebius's is $3.4B, making these deals an order of magnitude larger than current sales.
- Nvidia has invested $2 billion in each of CoreWeave and Nebius, with both targeting more than 5 GW of data center capacity by 2030; CoreWeave became the first cloud provider to run a Vera Rubin system in early June 2026.
- CoreWeave and Nebius have each secured 3.5 GW of contracted power capacity, with CoreWeave targeting 1.7 GW active by end of 2026 and Nebius 800 MW to 1 GW connected — though the vast majority of their contracted power remains offline.
- Meta's $125-145B 2026 capex guidance against $136B in projected operating cash flow would exceed its OCF, but neocloud contracts running through 2031-2032 add nothing to its balance sheet capex, averaging under $10B annually in opex.
- Microsoft's 2026 capex guidance of $190B against roughly $200B in operating cash flow would consume 95% of OCF on capex alone, with its $60B in neocloud deals recognized as operating expenses spread over many years.
- CoreWeave claims an MFU (model FLOPs utilization) rate of 35-45% — 20% above competitors — and reported achieving greater than 50% MFU on Hopper GPUs in a March 2025 blog post.
- Neoclouds lack the operating cash flow of Big Tech and are funding their buildouts through GPU-backed debt and Nvidia's financial backstop rather than internal cash generation, raising sustainability questions as macro conditions tighten.
Why it matters: Microsoft and Meta face capex levels that would consume 95%+ of their operating cash flow in 2026, so both are parking tens of billions with CoreWeave and Nebius to keep GPU buildout costs off their balance sheets — but those neoclouds are funding the same buildouts with GPU-backed debt and Nvidia's $2B stakes, the same firm selling them chips and backstopping their financing.
