EMJ Capital president Eric Jackson, sitting on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid round table with Brian Sozzi and reporter Brooke DiPalma, said CoreWeave's first-quarter results overnight should reset the bear case on Nvidia ahead of the chip designer's May 20 earnings.
The AI cloud provider booked roughly $40 billion in new backlog in the first quarter and grew its total order book to about $100 billion, alongside its first investment-grade debt facility backed specifically by AI infrastructure. Jackson, who described himself as a previous CoreWeave skeptic, said the print materially shifts the read for the chip designer reporting on May 20.
"It's a huge validation of demand for AI infrastructure. I've been a skeptic of CoreWeave before, but last night's results, I mean, here's the deal. $40 billion in new backlog in a quarter. And so it they basically grew their backlog to $100 billion sequentially. And so that is huge. They also announced the first investment grade debt facility basically backed by AI infrastructure that hasn't been done before," Jackson said. "You take all those three things together and it says that we've probably been too skeptical about Nvidia over these last few years."
Not every Wall Street desk read the print the same way. Sozzi noted that Bernstein reiterated a call for CoreWeave to fall to $67, in stark contrast to bull desks that hiked targets after the backlog disclosure.
The Yahoo Finance round table opened with the April non-farm payrolls report, which printed an increase of 115,000 jobs against an economist consensus of 55,000. Sozzi argued the beat was at least partly an AI capex story. "There's an AI buildout boom in this country and sure not all jobs reports will reflect this for a variety of different reasons like weather. But this report offers up a nice snapshot in how the AI boom is having positive effects on the labor market beyond just creating jobs on a data center construction site," he said.
The panel also surfaced a counter-current. Cloudflare disclosed an unexpected 20% layoff overnight, with Block already having cut around 10,000 staff earlier in the month and Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce and Oracle all running active reductions. Challenger, Gray and Christmas tagged April tech-sector job cuts at roughly 33,000, with about 26% explicitly tied to AI in the announcements.
DiPalma highlighted that severance accounting can mask the labour market signal. "He said when these companies offer severance this won't be reflected until months later and these people who now got let go who have been collecting severance who then maybe want a job later on this year then will be readded to the workforce and so this could be a delayed reaction definitely something to watch," she said, citing RBC Capital Markets' Michael Reid.
Sozzi argued the layoffs feed a different setup for second-half earnings. "We're suddenly now looking at a potential earnings boom from a lot of these tech companies in the back half of this year. I'm not maybe I'll discount or push aside the Mag 7 for a second. I'm looking at Cloudflare. I mean, here's a company not necessarily investing aggressively in AI infrastructure like a Meta now laying off 20% of its workforce. I mean, how won't their back half EPS outlook look absolutely amazing?" he said.
Jackson cautioned that the reaction has been uneven, with Cloudflare and Coinbase trading lower despite layoff announcements that should pad the back half. He distinguished defensive cost cuts in weakening businesses from proactive cuts at companies whose underlying numbers are tracking. The CoreWeave print, in his framing, sits squarely in the second camp.
The upshot for Nvidia is that the bear thesis on AI capex slowing or air pockets in cloud demand is harder to defend after CoreWeave's backlog jump and a stronger-than-expected jobs print that explicitly cites data centre build-out. The chip designer's May 20 quarter is now the fulcrum trade for the back half of 2026, with options-implied moves running well ahead of the typical Nvidia earnings band.