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Featured Story from MarketBeat 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 Musk's $1 Quadrillion AI IPO
A recent partnership sent a clear signal through the market about the future of artificial intelligence (AI)—and it has little to do with the training hype that has dominated headlines. When specialized cloud provider CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) saw its stock rise on news of a multi-year agreement with AI-native search company Perplexity, it was more than another customer win. While Wall Street has been focused on CoreWeave's aggressive spending, this alliance may have just revealed where the real, long-term revenue in the AI revolution will come from. 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 deal is to power Perplexity's AI inference operations—a crucial distinction for investors. Training a model is a computationally intensive, periodic task. Inference is the continuous, high-volume process of using that trained model to generate answers and predictions for millions of users in real time. Inference workloads demand consistently low latency because real users are waiting for responses. While training is a marathon, inference is a never-ending series of sprints. Perplexity's choice of CoreWeave over established, general-purpose cloud giants is a bellwether: for demanding, revenue-generating AI applications, specialized infrastructure is not just a preference, it's increasingly a necessity. Built Different: CoreWeave's Performance Edge CoreWeave's edge comes from architecture. It offers a GPU-first, bare-metal cloud purpose-built for AI, providing clients direct access to underlying hardware and minimizing software layers and operational overhead that can introduce latency. This specialization creates a 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, such as web hosting and data storage, but not optimized for the high-octane racetrack of AI inference.
That performance claim is validated by NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA). NVIDIA's deep partnership with CoreWeave extends well beyond its recent $2 billion investment. CoreWeave has earned NVIDIA's Exemplar Cloud status, a certification that signals the platform meets high standards for performance, reliability, and security. For enterprise customers, that stamp of approval de-risks their deployments and signals they are running workloads on a world-class platform. The alignment also gives CoreWeave early access to next-generation technology such as NVIDIA's Rubin platform, helping preserve its competitive moat. Investing in Certainty, Not Speculation Concerns about CoreWeave's aggressive spending and current net losses are understandable. The company has guided for $30 billion to $35 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, a level that raises near-term profitability questions. But viewed in isolation, that spending misses the broader context: this is not speculative buildup; it is capacity expansion backed by a large, pre-sold demand pipeline. CoreWeave's most compelling defense is its $66.8 billion contractually secured revenue backlog. The company is not building data centers on hope; it is manufacturing capacity that has already been purchased through long-term contracts. The average contract length has increased to roughly five years, providing strong visibility into future cash flows. Moreover, CoreWeave's ability to raise over $18 billion in capital in 2025 while lowering its average cost of borrowing demonstrates institutional confidence in the strategy. This aggressive investment is intended to secure the company's leadership position for years to come. What the Market May Be Missing CoreWeave's positioning in the inference market has clear implications for its valuation. While the stock currently trades around $79.50, the consensus price target among 30 Wall Street analysts is $124.34, implying meaningful upside. That gap suggests the market may still be valuing the company based on the high costs of its current build-out rather than the recurring revenue its infrastructure is likely to generate in the inference era. CoreWeave projects exiting 2026 with an annualized revenue run rate of $17 billion to $19 billion—more than doubling its revenue base in a single year according to its guidance and backlog. As the company converts backlog into revenue and signs additional high-profile inference customers like Perplexity, the valuation gap may narrow. An Essential Cloud for the Inference Era For investors assessing the AI landscape, the lesson may be to look past the training headlines and focus on the less-discussed but potentially more lucrative inference market. Companies building high-performance infrastructure for this phase are positioning themselves for durable, long-term growth. The CoreWeave–Perplexity deal is convincing evidence that CoreWeave has positioned itself as a primary contender in the emerging inference economy.
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