The natural language processing AI cloud unicorn that bubbled on Wall Street has again hit the blockade. Cloud-infrastructure bettor CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) which rose sharply over the last two months lost almost 10% after a series of insider trades that sent retail and institutional investors into a panic.
They may not have gotten to the location in a timely manner. Just weeks before CoreWeave was swimming in record revenues, AI usage across the world was going into overdrive, with quarterly earnings being three times greater than the previous year. However, since the post-IPO lockup is officially cancelled, major parties and executives are running at the door selling shares at a pace that could be breaking the market.
Magnetar Financial, formerly the biggest hedge fund sponsor of CoreWeave. Its recent $94.4 million asset write-down and other actions taken by top management, including CEO Michael Intrator and General Counsel Kristen McVeety, were signs of angst around what had been seen as the last AI infrastructure play.
Why do insiders sell so aggressively now, months after CoreWeave has made a splash in its blockbuster IPO, then? So, what does this predict for the future of the stock, particularly at a time when the company keeps reporting impressive gains in a red-hot AI market? Let’s dive deeper.
Thursday, August 28, 2025 Magnetar Financial and affiliates sold 915,339 shares valued at nearly $94.4 million. That sale came just weeks after the company had unloaded 1.5 million shares in early August, making its total sale of 2.4 million shares. One of the largest insiders exits since CoreWeave became a publicly traded company in March at a price of 40 per share.
On August 27, CEO Michael Intrator cashed out 82,455 shares worth almost 7.8 million at an average price of approximately $95. It is worth noting that General Counsel Kristen McVeety dispossesses her direct ownership of 311,796 shares valued at approximately $30 million, but retains an indirect ownership of some 95,000 shares in a trust.
These sales optics are important. Although the motivation behind insiders selling stock is usually to diversify or due to other reasons, the scale and timing of such transactions along with the fact that the stock was falling at full blast since July, even before the market was informed, have raised concerns that maybe there is something that the insiders are aware of but is unknown to the market.
CoreWeave was not an IPO. Its central position in the growing AI infrastructure market stimulated one of the most anticipated debuts of the year when the company listed in March 2025 at $40 per share. By July, stocks had surged to an all-time high of $184, or a phenomenal 365% gain in just under five months.
Investors were also running after this differentiated positioning of CoreWeave in the space, it operates AI-centric cloud computing services, executed using NVIDIA GPUs, which have been languishing in supply due to the burst of generative AI demand.
The basics seemed to support the hype. During Q2 2025, the revenue of CoreWeave grew to $1.2 billion, which is nearly three times more than the revenue of the prior year, $395 million, and it is a huge growth achieved due to colossal demand on the training of AI models by both enterprises and startups.
But even with such growth at the top line the company is not profitable. The losses increased while CoreWeave continues to aggressively expand its data center footprint, infrastructure construction, and even entering into long-term GPU contracts with NVIDIA. At first investors accepted such losses because the market wanted to be exposed to AI. However, as insiders’ cash in and the mood turns, the first signs of holes in the story that used to be invulnerable are appearing.
Large shareholders and C-suite executives engaging in insider selling can be a very powerful signal to the market. Although this does not necessarily indicate that the insiders feel the company has hit its peak, it is concerning that both the hedge funds and the executives are recording huge profits right after the lockup period.
Shares of CoreWeave are already down an estimated 50% since July, falling to approximately $93 by September 3. That is a nasty correction, eliminating billions of its market value in weeks.
The same question is haunting investors, since there is indeed open-ended growth potential in the AI infrastructure involving CoreWeave, why are individuals who run it and support it scurrying to sell the company?
In order to see the opportunity (and threat) of CoreWeave, you have to consider the broader AI market. The adoption of AI is going at a breakneck pace. The amount of AI expended worldwide is estimated to reach $400 billion per year by 2030, and a large portion of the sum will be spent on cloud and data center setups to facilitate model training and application.
CoreWeave has carved a niche for doing this. Unlike Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud which are suitable for a broad spectrum of clients. CoreWeave aims to target virtually all AI companies with AI workloads that are CPU/GPU intensive. This is why it is such a mission-critical supplier to startups and enterprises developing advanced models.
Another advantage for this company is the long-term relationship with NVIDIA. NVIDIA has dominated the market for GPUs for years and its hardware is sold until 2025.
The critics claim that the insider trading by CoreWeave is nothing but a means of notifying investors about the financial risk that the company is encountering. The concerns include:
The long-term bulls by comparison view the selloff as an opportunity to buy. Their arguments:
TradingView statistics show that CRWV has fallen by close to 50% since July. However, it remains over 130% above its price at IPO five months ago. Indicators of sentiment indicate that retail investors are frightened. The trading volume of options has increased this week, including a high level of bearish put options as speculators bet that the downward trend will continue. However, Hedge funds have been more cautious, and some of them have cut their holdings instead of increasing their bets.
There are multiple factors that will determine whether or not investors will regain confidence in CoreWeave and each of them is interlinked and has a critical role to play in the future of the stock.
To start with, is the trend of an increase in income of the company. The revenues of CoreWeave have been increasing very rapidly and are likely to reach between $5.15 and $5.35 billion, or approximately 174% per annum.
But to regain investor confidence, we have to not only witness great top-line momentum, but also a reduction in losses and some marginal improvement as well, as net losses have been high even with operating gains.
CoreWeave and other companies are experiencing very high data center capacity growth rates and are investing billions of dollars into infrastructure, but must be careful of spending and balance sheets before tempted to go over-levered or cash flow limits.
Even the tone may vary according to new partners and a long-term association with such giants of the industry as OpenAI is not only the sign that the demand is likely to stay the same but a strategically useful market in AI.
Finally is the outcome of insider behavior, a rise in high volume executive selling (as with the recent unloading of the largest stake by Kristen McVeety) would only make people more pessimistic.
The story of CoreWeave is by no means over. Despite the recent beat, the firm is still at the center of the AI infrastructure boom. Its unique features (GPU cloud services), its synergy with NVIDIA, and, finally, its ability to rapidly grow revenues give it enormous potential over the long term.
There is a short-term outlook that seems grim as insider selling and loss of investor confidence have set in. Bulls are buying at the $93 level or above IPO price, but bears say that the stock could see additional pressure as shares increase and the company has yet to turn a profit.
Over the coming months CoreWeave has to move the insider exit story to action. The stock will quickly recover as long as it and everyone else can prove that AI-powered growth is not hype, but a long-term business strategy.
But for now, investors can likely buckle for more volatility. CoreWeave is preparing for a first proof of concept in the next quarter or two, not just of the company itself but of the larger AI infrastructure boom that is taking over Wall Street.
Nvidia’s stock doesn’t merely trade, rather it performs usually with elegance. Having rallied 19.7% in…
Wall Street doesn’t give out participation trophies, but if it did, Oracle would be grabbing…
A larger 6.3-inch Super Retina XDR screen with 120 Hz ProMotion and a maximum brightness…
A larger 6.3-inch Super Retina XDR screen with 120 Hz ProMotion and a maximum brightness…
Apple has also introduced its new series of products with the iPhone 17, iPhone 17…
Since last July, Apple’s stocks have soared adding a staggering $430 billion in the company’s…