Oppenheimer holds $150 CoreWeave target, sees bond selloff as overdone

Oppenheimer is standing behind CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) with a $150 price target even as the stock has shed 37% over the past month, arguing that a selloff in the company’s unsecured bonds has created a misleading picture of financial risk. Shares closed yesterday at $56.43.

Analyst Param Singh reiterated an Outperform rating on CRWV, framing the note around a detailed stress test of the company’s balance sheet and cash flow potential. "CoreWeave’s unsecured bonds sold off on rising rates/GPU obsolescence fears," Singh wrote. "While CoreWeave has more value as a going concern, we look at a few different scenarios why the credit markets may be adding unnecessary pressure on the equity valuation."

At the heart of Oppenheimer’s defense is a liquidation analysis. Singh estimates approximately $83 billion of recoverable assets against roughly $42 billion of pro forma debt and approximately $37 billion of other liabilities, according to Oppenheimer’s calculations. The conclusion: even in the worst case, "we see a full recovery for unsecured debt," Singh wrote, with the firm arguing that longer actual server utilization understates the assets carried on CoreWeave’s balance sheet relative to accounting-based depreciation.

To illustrate this, Singh points to a CoreWeave A100 GPU contract running through 2029 as evidence of a nine-year useful server life, materially longer than the six-year depreciation assumption embedded in standard accounting. That gap, Oppenheimer argues, means the bond market is penalizing CoreWeave for an obsolescence risk that contracted customer demand does not support.

Oppenheimer also constructed two hypothetical capex pause scenarios to show how much free cash the business could generate if it stopped expanding. "For one if CoreWeave decides to take a pause in growing active power in 2027 (1.9GW) or 2028 (3.3GW), the company can generate ~$9B and ~$16B in annual FCFF at steady state," Singh wrote. He was careful to add: "Note that the stop-build scenarios are only hypothetical, and we see the company successfully continuing its planned build-out." The exercise is a stress test, not a forecast, but it underscores Oppenheimer’s view that the underlying asset base is more durable than the bond market currently implies.

On the competitive positioning front, Singh sees CoreWeave as the strongest-placed name in AI infrastructure over the long run. "Long-term winners will build full software stacks addressing inference and enterprise needs, optimizing revenue and cost per MW for superior ROI," he wrote. Oppenheimer cites CoreWeave’s differentiated software stack as the key differentiator separating it from more commoditized GPU cloud providers.

The near-term setup matters too. Oppenheimer expects CoreWeave to report a third-quarter 2026 beat and raise its full-year revenue outlook modestly to 160% year-over-year growth, supported by ramping capacity and pricing. Singh also sees greater upside in 2027 as additional capacity, software attach rates, and higher-value workloads begin to contribute more meaningfully to the top line.