2026 could be the year that AI grows up.
Three years after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the AI boom is in full effect. Stocks like Nvidia have soared, adding trillions of dollars in market value, but there are still some doubts about whether AI will have the same real-world impact as the concerns about an AI bubble indicate.
However, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar recently said that 2026 will be a year of "practical adoption," meaning the start-up intends to close the gap between AI's possibilities and its everyday usage.
OpenAI has also been a winner from the AI boom as it's reached run rate revenue of $20 billion and a valuation of $500 billion, though the company is losing billions of dollars a year.
OpenAI's ramp is risky as the buildout it envisions over the next ten years will require hundreds of billions of dollars in funding. It's unclear how much compute capacity the company is planning to add this year, but its capacity tripled in each of the last two years, reaching 1.9 gigawatts (GW) in 2025.
According to some estimates, OpenAI is planning to add 4 GW of capacity this year, bringing its total to around 6 GW.
Much of the AI sector is relying on OpenAI's success as its technology forms the foundation of AI models being used across the software industry, but arguably no company has more to potentially gain from OpenAI's success than CoreWeave (CRWV 2.56%), the biggest neocloud company.
Image source: Getty Images.
CoreWeave's volatile position
Like OpenAI, CoreWeave is seeing explosive top-line growth, but it's losing a lot of money as it spends aggressively on data centers to rent out GPUs and computing power to customers like OpenAI.
Investors seem unsure what to make of the stock as it has been highly volatile since it went public last March. The stock gained more than 300% at one point, only to then fall more than 60% before recouping some of those losses.
CoreWeave's price action has been an indicator for the market's broader sentiment around AI as the stock soared last spring as AI drove the market recovery following the panic around tariffs, but later in the year, the stock tumbled on concerns about an AI bubble.
NASDAQ: CRWV
Key Data Points
The OpenAI connection
Because of its sensitivity to AI sentiment, CoreWeave has a lot of exposure to OpenAI as the start-up is driving AI sentiment more than any other company with the possible exception of Nvidia.
CoreWeave and OpenAI are working closely together, and OpenAI has agreed to contract up to $22.4 billion of capacity from CoreWeave.
How OpenAI performs this year and in the future will determine how quickly it scales up to use that capacity, which will go a long way to determining CoreWeave's own success and growth rate.
Expect CoreWeave stock to continue to be volatile this year, but if OpenAI remains healthy and hits its growth targets, that will be a good sign for CoreWeave.
