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Today's Bonus Article CoreWeave Just Landed a Deal That Signals Where AI Is HeadedAuthor: Jeffrey Neal Johnson. Published: 3/5/2026. 
Key Points - CoreWeave's specialized, high-performance infrastructure provides a crucial advantage in the demanding and rapidly growing AI inference market.
- A deep technical partnership with NVIDIA, which includes a coveted industry certification, validates CoreWeave's platform as a world-class solution.
- An extensive backlog of long-term contracts provides significant visibility into future revenue and underpins the company's strategic growth investments.
- Special Report: Elon's "Hidden" Company
A recent partnership sent a clear market signal about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) — and it's less about the training hype that has dominated headlines. When specialized cloud provider CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) saw its stock climb after a multi-year deal with AI-native search company Perplexity, it signaled more than a routine customer win. While Wall Street has focused on CoreWeave's aggressive spending, this alliance highlights where the real, long-term revenue in the AI revolution may be generated. A Bellwether Deal for the New AI Battleground Perplexity, a company built around delivering fast, accurate AI-powered answers, has entrusted its critical workload to CoreWeave. The agreement specifically covers AI inference operations — a crucial distinction for investors because it points to a fundamental shift in the AI market. For several years the dominant narrative has centered on training: the initial, computation-heavy process of teaching a model on massive datasets. Training is vital but often episodic. Inference is different — it's the continuous, high-volume work of using a trained model to generate answers and predictions for millions of users in real time. If training is building a comprehensive library, inference is everyone checking out books from that library, all at once, 24/7. Inference workloads are exceptionally demanding. They require consistently low latency because real users are waiting for answers — any delay degrades the experience. While training is a marathon, inference is an endless series of sprints. The decision by a performance-focused AI leader like Perplexity to choose CoreWeave over general-purpose cloud giants is a bellwether. It suggests that for the revenue-generating, latency-sensitive applications of AI, specialized infrastructure is not just preferred; it's essential. Built Different: CoreWeave's Performance Edge CoreWeave's wins in inference stem from a fundamental architectural advantage. The company offers a GPU-first, bare-metal cloud purpose-built for AI. That design gives clients direct access to underlying hardware, minimizing software layers and operational overhead that can add latency. That specialization creates a measurable performance gap versus legacy hyperscalers, whose platforms are designed to be generalists. For investors, the difference is simple: - CoreWeave (Specialized): The Formula 1 car of the cloud world — engineered to deliver maximum speed and performance for demanding AI workloads.
- Legacy Hyperscalers (Generalized): The SUV — versatile and reliable for many tasks, like web hosting and storage, but not optimized for the high-octane racetrack of AI inference.
This performance advantage isn't just marketing; it's validated by the industry's most important name: NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA). NVIDIA's deep partnership with CoreWeave extends beyond its recent $2 billion investment and serves as a strong technical endorsement. CoreWeave has earned NVIDIA's Exemplar Cloud status, a certification that signals its platform meets high standards for performance, reliability and security. For enterprise customers, that stamp of approval reduces execution risk and assures they are running workloads on a world-class platform. The alignment also gives CoreWeave early access to next-generation technology like NVIDIA's Rubin platform, helping preserve its competitive moat for years to come. Investing in Certainty, Not Speculation Many observers worry about CoreWeave's aggressive spending and current net losses. The company has guided for $30 billion to $35 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, which understandably raises questions about near-term profitability. But looking at that spending in isolation misses the larger point: this is not speculative outlay; it is a calculated investment to fulfill a pre-sold pipeline of demand. Supporting that view is CoreWeave's $66.8 billion in contractually secured revenue backlog. The company isn't building capacity on hope — it is manufacturing infrastructure that customers have committed to via long-term contracts. The quality of that backlog further reduces financial risk. Average contract lengths have risen to roughly five years, giving strong visibility into future cash flows. CoreWeave's ability to raise more than $18 billion in capital in 2025 while lowering its average borrowing costs demonstrates institutional confidence in this strategy. That aggressive investment is what positions CoreWeave to lead the inference market over the coming years. What the Market May Be Missing This strategic positioning in inference has direct implications for CoreWeave's valuation. While the stock trades around $79.50, the consensus price target among 30 Wall Street analysts is $124.34, implying substantial upside from current levels. That gap suggests the market may still be valuing the company primarily on the high costs of its current build-out phase rather than the recurring revenue its infrastructure can generate in the inference era. CoreWeave's own projections, backed by its backlog, call for exiting 2026 with an annualized revenue run rate of $17 billion to $19 billion — more than doubling its revenue base in a single year. As the company converts backlog into revenue and signs more high-profile inference customers like Perplexity, that valuation gap may begin to narrow. An Essential Cloud for the Inference Era For investors navigating the AI landscape, the crucial question may be less about training and more about inference. The firms building the high-performance infrastructure for that next phase are positioning themselves for durable, long-term growth. The Perplexity deal is strong evidence that CoreWeave has established itself as a primary contender in the inference-focused "gold rush." For investors focused on where AI will actually monetize at scale, that distinction matters.
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