Shares of AI infrastructure firms surged Wednesday as strong earnings reports from CoreWeave and Nebius revived the chip-related trade on the Nasdaq.
The rally signals a return of investor confidence in the hardware layer of artificial intelligence after a period of volatility and a steep sell-off in July.
CoreWeave shares rose approximately 19% in pre-market trading [3] following a report that the company's second-quarter revenue doubled year-over-year [2]. The infrastructure provider also reported a massive backlog of orders valued at $104 billion [5].
Nebius saw an even sharper increase, with its stock rising about 34% after earnings [4]. Market expectations for the company were high, with second-quarter revenue projected to surge 466% to $574.6 million [1].
Super Micro and other chip-related firms also trended higher during the session. The gains were driven by surging demand for AI compute, which has led to significant revenue growth and large order backlogs across the sector.
Investors have spent the last several weeks questioning whether the massive spending on AI data centers would yield immediate returns. Wednesday's performance suggests that the demand for the physical infrastructure, including GPU clusters and servers, remains robust despite broader market concerns.
The recovery comes as the industry continues to scale its capacity to meet the needs of large language model developers and enterprise AI users.
“CoreWeave shares rose approximately 19% in pre-market trading”
This rally indicates that the market is shifting its focus from general AI speculation to the tangible revenue generated by the 'picks and shovels' of the industry. By rewarding companies with massive backlogs and triple-digit revenue growth, investors are signaling that the physical build-out of AI capacity is still in an aggressive growth phase, regardless of short-term fluctuations in software valuations.
