The artificial intelligence gold rush has created winners and wannabes. Two companies at the center of that storm, C3.ai and CoreWeave, have taken very different paths in the race to capitalize on enterprise AI demand. Both play crucial roles in the AI stack, one builds the software brains, the other supplies the computational muscle. But only one of them has the market’s full attention.
Let’s unpack why CoreWeave stock has exploded since its IPO while C3.ai is still trying to win back investor trust, and whether that gap is deserved.
Key Points
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C3.ai is growing again but remains unprofitable, with insider selling and an unproven business model weighing on investor confidence.
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CoreWeave is rapidly scaling AI infrastructure, serving major clients like OpenAI and growing revenue at over 100% CAGR despite heavy losses.
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Investor sentiment clearly favors CoreWeave, driven by strong insider buying, faster growth, and a clearer path to profitability.
C3.ai Is Hunting But Still Behind
C3.ai went public in late 2020 at $42 per share, riding a wave of hype around enterprise AI adoption but today the stock is languishing around $25 per share, a 40% drop from its debut.
So what happened? Well, first, revenue growth sputtered. Fiscal 2023 saw so-so sub-10% top-line growth as enterprise budgets tightened, competition intensified, and a shift to consumption-based pricing cannibalized some of its own subscription business. Making matters worse, a sizable chunk of revenue, nearly one third, came from a joint venture with Baker Hughes that was set to expire.
Margins shrank. Losses mounted. Interest rates soared, putting pressure on unprofitable tech valuations. Bulls fled.
But C3 staged a turnaround.
In fiscal 2024 and 2025, revenue growth re-accelerated, up 16% and 25%, respectively, thanks to a new suite of generative AI modules and deeper relationships with Microsoft, Amazon, and McKinsey. The Baker Hughes JV was extended for another three years. Federal contracts are also starting to contribute meaningfully.
Looking ahead, C3 expects revenue to climb 15% to 25% in fiscal 2026, and analysts project a 22% CAGR through 2028. That sounds promising. At over 7x sales, the stock isn’t egregiously priced.
But C3 still isn’t profitable, and it no longer even expects to hit adjusted breakeven soon. Instead, it’s doubling down on R&D to compete in an arms race it helped start. And while the leadership is vocal about long-term vision, insiders have been net sellers over the past year, offloading twice as many shares as they bought. That’s not exactly a show of confidence.
CoreWeave Is The Cloud’s Secret Weapon
While C3 struggles to convince investors it can win in enterprise AI software, CoreWeave is sprinting ahead in a very different corner of the AI universe, which is cloud infrastructure.
Originally an Ethereum mining outfit, CoreWeave made a bold switch in 2018. As crypto collapsed, it repurposed its mining GPUs for AI workloads and never looked back. That early-mover advantage has paid off in spades.
The company now operates over 30 data centers, offering remote access to high-performance GPUs purpose-built for AI model training and inference.
The results have been staggering with revenue jumping from $16 million in 2022 to $1.9 billion in 2024.
Analysts expect that to hit over $16 billion by 2027, a more than 100% CAGR and management expects to hit profitability by the end of that window.
Unlike traditional cloud providers, CoreWeave claims it can deliver AI compute 35x faster and four fifths cheaper by tailoring its infrastructure specifically for machine learning workloads. That’s a massive differentiator.
But there are risks and rapid expansion isn’t cheap. Net losses ballooned to just shy of $900 million last year, and the company now sports a debt-to-equity ratio of nearly 10, meaning it’s aggressively leveraged.
That would normally be a red flag, but insiders have bought 19 times as many shares as they’ve sold in the past year. When management puts its money where its mouth is, it’s worth paying attention.
The stock, up 300% since its March IPO, trades at 16x forward sales, not cheap, but arguably justified given the growth curve.
Which One’s the Better Buy?
Both C3.ai and CoreWeave are speculative bets. Neither is a cash-flow machine. Both are playing in white-hot sectors with huge total addressable markets. But the trajectories are worlds apart.
C3 is trying to evolve from a government and energy-focused legacy AI player into a more diversified generative AI platform, but the road has been bumpy, and it still hasn’t proven the model can scale profitably.
CoreWeave, by contrast, is tapping directly into AI’s infrastructure bottleneck. As the world’s appetite for training massive models grows, companies are scrambling for GPU compute, and CoreWeave is right there with the supply.
If you’re picking between the two, the answer is clear, because CoreWeave is growing faster, expanding smarter, and backed by customers and insiders who seem to believe it’s just getting started.