JPMorgan is staying bullish on CoreWeave in the leadup to its quarterly results Tuesday after the bell. Analyst Mark Murphy raised his price target on the cloud computing stock to $135 from $66, implying more than 4% upside from Friday’s close, and maintained his overweight rating. Murphy said he’s “cautiously optimistic” on the long-term prospects of the company, especially after it secured a five-year deal with OpenAI back earlier this year for artificial intelligence data centers at $11.9 billion. “Our sense is that CoreWeave’s opportunities are going to get bigger and lumpier, likely to the surprise of investors, though we are not making a specific call on the upcoming Q2 results as it is likely a futile exercise to speculate on the closing of specific deals and investors should in fact expect extreme lumpiness in CoreWeave’s pattern of large bookings,” the analyst wrote in a note dated Sunday. While Murphy thinks CoreWeave’s long-term AI ramp is “clear” and “intact,” he said the timing between its large bookings and buildouts remain an overhang on a quarterly basis. That could create “ongoing extreme volatility in CRWV shares,” he said. CRWV 3M mountain CRWV, 3-month Still, the analyst is optimistic about the trajectory of the company’s business pipeline, which could ultimately lead to growth in the long run. “Although timing and lumpiness still give us pause and create extreme volatility, we are positive on the potential for continued momentum in CoreWeave’s business pipeline, and our field work suggests long-range potential for binary-outcome transactions which are very difficult to handicap and, if successful, can drive a very surprising magnitude of outsized growth and outsized debt financing with short-term cash burn,” Murphy said. Murphy is in the minority of analysts covering the stock, as 16 out of 24 in total have stepped to the sidelines with a hold rating, per LSEG. Its roughly $100 consensus target also implies more than 22% downside. The stock was almost 3% higher in premarket trading Monday. Shares have soared more than 152% in the past three months but only about 3% in the last month.
