Raymond James is placing a fresh bet on CoreWeave (CRWV), telling clients the cloud upstart sits at the heart of a historic wave of artificial intelligence spending.
In new coverage, the brokerage, which oversees more than $1.6 trillion in client assets, argues that Wall Street estimates on AI CapEx “appear too low versus our bottom-up build expectations,” reports Barron’s.
Raymond James analysts say Wall Street expects $550 billion in AI spending by 2028 from Amazon, Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, CoreWeave, and Oracle, but they project the figure will reach $900 billion. They say CRWV is poised to capture a meaningful slice of that AI investment boom, as demand for computing power accelerates.
CoreWeave is a specialized cloud infrastructure provider that delivers GPU-accelerated computing power primarily for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning workloads.
Analysts also stressed that the challenge of running AI infrastructure goes beyond simply adding more servers.
“The complexity and novelty of building AI Cloud stacks is underappreciated.”
Raymond James points to the technical barriers that make scaling difficult, and they argued that CoreWeave’s ability to integrate hardware, software, and customer demands gives it an edge in a market where execution risk is often underestimated.
The trillion-dollar brokerage sets a $130 price target for CRWV, believing the firm can hit $20 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2027.
Last week, CoreWeave rolled out CoreWeave Ventures, an investment arm that will provide a mix of capital, compute-for-equity transactions, and access to its GPU-heavy cloud platform to help founders bring products to market faster.
Co-founder Brannin McBee says the project is designed to support founders pushing technical advancements.
“Our aim with CoreWeave Ventures is to give other audacious, like-minded founders the support they need to drive technical advancements and bring to market the next class of innovation.”