CoreWeave (CRWV +4.60%) is one of the hottest stocks on Wall Street right now and has risen over 40% to start 2026. With returns like that, some investors may wonder if CoreWeave is their ticket to becoming a millionaire.
A $10,000 investment in CoreWeave would require 100x returns to transform into $1 million. But is that realistic? Let's take a look.
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CoreWeave has a massive market opportunity in front of it
CoreWeave builds and fills data centers with cutting-edge graphics processing units (GPUs) that it rents out to clients who often use them for artificial intelligence (AI) training purposes. There is a massive demand for AI computing power, and CoreWeave is looking to capture some of this market opportunity. CoreWeave is essentially a cloud computing business that specializes in AI, and this business model has already been proven to be a successful one.
Amazon (AMZN +0.11%) (Amazon Web Services), Alphabet (GOOG +0.85%) (GOOGL +0.90%) (Google Cloud), and Microsoft (MSFT 0.34%) (Azure) have all built successful cash cows from their cloud computing platforms, and if CoreWeave can duplicate their success on the AI side of things, it could be a successful stock pick. But is it enough to deliver 100x returns?
NASDAQ: CRWV
Key Data Points
Currently, CoreWeave has a market cap of $50 billion, so a 100x return would result in a $5 trillion company. I don't think that's realistic, as it would require Nvidia (NVDA +0.47%), where CoreWeave purchases its GPUs from, to be dramatically larger. So, I think the possibility is off the table.
But what if we slash one zero off the expectations and see if CoreWeave could deliver 10x returns? Turning $10,000 into $100,000 may not be as glamorous as $1 million, but it's still an impressive return that most investments won't match.
A 10x return is far more realistic
CoreWeave is putting up some incredible growth numbers that you have to see to believe. In the third quarter, its revenue rose an impressive 134% year over year to $1.3 billion. For Q4, Wall Street analysts expect $1.54 billion in growth. For 2026, the average of 27 analysts expect 135% growth from CoreWeave. It's hard to imagine many companies growing that fast at this stage of the AI build-out, but CoreWeave is slated to deliver that level of growth and more over the next few years. In fact, it has a $56 billion backlog to churn through over the next few years -- a figure that's only expected to increase.
However, one mark against CoreWeave is its profitability. It's taking a growth-at-all-costs approach to its data center build-out, and its profitability is suffering. The question is, can it match other cloud computing providers' business models? In Q3, AWS delivered an impressive 35% operating margin. Google Cloud's margin wasn't as great, but it was still a strong 18%.
If we assume CoreWeave can generate a long-term operating margin of 20%, trade for a reasonable 30 times operating profit, and achieve a $500 billion market cap (what's needed for a 10x return), that means it needs to generate around $83 billion annually in revenue.
For fiscal year 2026, Wall Street expects $12 billion in revenue. So, we're a long way off from CoreWeave delivering that level of growth.
A 100x return for CoreWeave isn't realistic, and even a 10x may be impossible. Over the past 12 months, the largest cloud computing provider in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS), generated $122 billion in revenue. CoreWeave needs to be two-thirds that size to deliver the 10x returns, which may be possible, but it's a ways off.
I think CoreWeave can be a good stock pick, but I think a better investment is the company that it's buying GPUs from: Nvidia. Nvidia doesn't have the profitability risk CoreWeave does, and it's slated to benefit from the same tailwinds as CoreWeave.
