Summer storms delayed construction at a Denton, Texas site that CoreWeave plans to energize in 2026 to provide AI computing to OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Inclement rain and wind prevented contractors from pouring concrete for approximately 60 days during the summer at the site, which is owned and operated by Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), according to sources who spoke to the WSJ. CoreWeave pushed back the completion date for the 260-megawatt cluster by several months on account of the impediments.
The revelation of this summer construction delay sheds more light on construction hangups that CoreWeave addressed in its Q3 earnings call. In addition to summer storms impeding progress, an alleged transformer fire at Denton, Texas may have also created delays.
CEO Michael Intrator addressed the operational hurdles during CoreWeave’s Q3 earnings call on November 10. Intrator initially attributed the issues to a single facility before describing them as “systemic challenges” later in the discussion. CFO Nitin Agrawal clarified the delays involved one specific data center provider rather than a portfolio-wide failure.
CoreWeave lowered its capital expenditure guidance for 2025 to a range of $12 billion to $14 billion, down from an earlier projection of $20 billion to $23 billion. The company shifted the majority of its remaining spending to the first quarter of 2026. CoreWeave also narrowed its revenue guidance for 2025 to a range between $5.05 and $5.15 billion.
At the time of publication, CRWV is down 56% over the last 6 months and 22% week-over-week, and it has lost nearly $33 billion in market capitalization since the beginning of Q4.
Enron short seller Jim Chanos has pointed to the high levels of debt CoreWeave utilizes to purchase Nvidia chips as a red flag for the neocloud. Gil Luria, an analyst with D.A. Davidson, noted that CoreWeave operates with margins of approximately 4%, which is less than half of what it pays in interest on its debt.
“The bull case is that they’ll scale into it, and that a lot of companies have low margins to start, but this is a company at scale,” Luria said. “There is no scaling going on here.”
