Cathie Wood Buys 381,231 CoreWeave Shares in Two Days and Dismisses the Debt Fears
CoreWeave (CRWV) tumbled 15.46% on Wednesday, Oct. 14, closing at $65.78 — its worst single-day drop since February — and slipped another 3.5% after hours. Cathie Wood's ARK Invest bought 188,665 shares that day, worth about $12.4 million at the close: 145,319 shares through the flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) and 43,346 through ARK Next Generation Internet (ARKW). The stock bounced 5.9% on Thursday to roughly $69.66 and ARK bought 192,566 more shares, about $13.4 million at the close. Together the two days totaled 381,231 shares, roughly $25.8 million. In the same window ARK sold 31,432 Palantir shares (about $6.3 million) and trimmed Amazon — money moving out of an AI software winner and into an indebted AI infrastructure name.
In an interview in Seoul on Friday, Wood argued through Bloomberg that steep borrowing costs are typical for young companies raising capital while rates are elevated, and that the investment in the AI computing supplier will pay off. She also rejected the bubble framing, saying the market is at a "very early" stage and that "the fear out there actually is good" — the fact people are afraid means there is no bubble. Her baseball analogy: some call this the first inning, but she says the market is still in the parking lot before entering the stadium. On the same Seoul trip she told ChosunBiz that the selloff in Korean memory-chip stocks is "indeed the right time to enter a buying zone."
The fundamentals behind her optimism: second-quarter revenue of $2.575 billion, up 112% from $1.212 billion a year earlier; a revenue backlog of about $104 billion at June 30, up 246% year over year, plus more than $25 billion of new commitments in early in the third quarter; and co-founder Brannin McBee's claim that nearly all of CoreWeave's 2027 capacity is already sold. The counterweight is the financing structure: roughly $52 billion in combined debt and lease obligations, and second-quarter net interest expense of $640 million that exceeded its $626 million net loss. Wood's bet is that scarce compute demand persists for years and the cash flow eventually services the debt.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a Bloomberg event in Stockholm on Thursday that "CoreWeave's strength is improving every day" and that he was optimistic, adding that its cost of capital is actually decreasing and no Nvidia backstop is needed. Nvidia owns roughly 10% of CoreWeave and has invested an additional $2 billion. The bounce lasted a single session: the stock fell 11.91% on Friday to $61.39, down about 25% for the week. Analysts are split — JPMorgan's Samik Chatterjee calls the selloff overdone, Bernstein keeps Underperform with a $74 target, and D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria warns the equity could go to zero if the AI boom falters.
The most directly affected are holders of ARKK and ARKW, who now carry doubled exposure to a highly levered, capital-hungry single name. This is also not a one-off dip buy: ARK purchased 239,083 shares in September (about $19.1 million), another 97,639 shares on Oct. 6 (about $8.9 million) and 214,589 shares on Oct. 7 (about $18.9 million) — buying on nearly every session for weeks. Her public defense also acts as a sentiment anchor for the whole neocloud group, a day after peer Nebius fell 12% on Friday.
ARK discloses its trades daily, so the next filings will show whether she keeps buying near $61. More important is CoreWeave's own funding window: Bank of America's model projects about $67 billion of cumulative negative free cash flow from 2026 through 2028 and roughly $59 billion of new borrowing. Refinancing costs, third-quarter results and fresh customer commitments will decide whether Wood's read is validated — and the gap between her denial of a bubble and the credit market's tense pricing is where the next move in this stock will come from.