CRWV
NBIS
New analyst fuel
CoreWeave and Nebius are getting a Tuesday pop after Piper Sandler stepped in with fresh coverage on both AI neocloud names. That kind of note can act like a caffeine shot for stocks already trading on “future of AI infrastructure” vibes.
CoreWeave gets the better seat
Piper Sandler started CoreWeave at Overweight with a $151 price target, while Nebius got a more cautious Neutral and a $224 target. The firm’s core argument is simple: AI demand is still sprinting faster than companies can build the compute to serve it.
For CoreWeave, the bull case leans on:
- its software stack, which Piper says helps lower cost per unit of AI output
- flexible workload routing across providers
- financing tied to customer contracts, which lowers the usual “this is capital-intensive and scary” investor headache
Nebius still gets love, just less confetti
Nebius got credit for a leaner setup — leasing a lot of real estate, designing its own server hardware, and using customer prepayments to help fund growth. Piper Sandler thinks that model could still scale in a big way, but the stock has a near-term wrinkle: a public hearing this week tied to permitting for one of its major data center sites.
That’s the sort of thing that can turn a clean growth story into a messy calendar reminder.
Why you should care
Piper Sandler’s broader call is that the GPU-as-a-service market could go from about $18 billion today to more than $100 billion by 2029. If that math holds even roughly, small slices of a fast-growing pie can turn into very large revenue streams — and that’s why investors are bidding these names up.
Big picture: when Wall Street decides the bottleneck is real, infrastructure stocks suddenly start looking less like “expensive spenders” and more like the toll booths on the AI highway.