CoreWeave Stock: India Data Center Won't Pay Off Until 2028

CoreWeave's planned Asian data centers now total 600 megawatts, equal to 40% of the 1.5 gigawatts of power it had running at midyear, and none of that capacity will earn revenue before 2028. The bill is arriving first. The AI cloud company reported second-quarter interest expense, net, of $640 million in its earnings release filed with the SEC.

The newest piece came on Wednesday, Oct. 7, when CoreWeave said it plans to take 240 megawatts at AdaniConneX's Taloja campus in Navi Mumbai, its first site in India. The shares closed down 3.57% at $88.45 that day, according to Nasdaq market data, a steeper fall than the Nasdaq Composite's 0.22% dip. SquawkNews tied the selling to broad tech weakness and rising Treasury yields rather than to the deal itself.

Three 80 MW Buildings and One Tenant in Taloja

CoreWeave's release says the campus will span three 80 MW buildings, with CoreWeave as the sole tenant and the right to add up to 240 MW more. It plans to run Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform for training, inference, reasoning and agent workloads. The first phase is due in mid-2028, with more capacity coming in stages. CoreWeave will also open an India office and hire locally, and it tied the project to the government's IndiaAI Mission.

AdaniConneX is a 50:50 joint venture of Adani Enterprises and EdgeConneX. CoreWeave did not put a price on the project. Bloomberg, in a report syndicated by NDTV Profit, said the investment is expected to total multiple billions of dollars over the life of the project.

How 240 MW Compares With India's 2028 AI Build

Wood Mackenzie's July 27 report puts India's AI-dedicated data center capacity at 275 MW in 2025, rising to 6,546 MW by 2030. That path implies growth of roughly 88% a year. If it holds, India would have about 1.8 GW of AI capacity in 2028, the year CoreWeave's first phase is due, by TradeFlock's estimate. CoreWeave's 240 MW would be about 13% of that, a large single tenant rather than a match for the national build.

The bigger project in India is Google's. Its 1 GW AI hub in Visakhapatnam, being built with AdaniConneX and Airtel's Nxtra, is about four times the size of CoreWeave's campus. Business Standard reported that the $15 billion hub's first phase is targeted for 2028, with full operations within five years, and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has said it will be inaugurated in September 2028, BusinessLine reported. That makes AdaniConneX the builder behind two foreign AI campuses due in India in 2028.

Wood Mackenzie says Maharashtra, home to Navi Mumbai, and Tamil Nadu together hold around 65% of India's installed IT load, and it flags water as an underrated risk as AI racks push cooling needs higher. CoreWeave's design uses direct liquid cooling in GPU halls and a chilled water system that does not rely on evaporation. Siting is a political issue in the U.S. too, where Amazon dropped government NDAs on data center permits amid local opposition.

Planned Asia Sites Equal 40% of CoreWeave's Running Power

India is CoreWeave's second Asian market in nine weeks. On Aug. 4 it announced three Indonesian facilities with 360 MW of contracted IT power, also due in 2028. Together the two markets add 600 MW, against 1.5 GW of active power at June 30.

Contracted power was about 3.7 GW at quarter end and reached about 4.2 GW by the Aug. 11 earnings call, a figure set before the India deal. Revenue backlog stood at about $104 billion at June 30, excluding more than $25 billion of new commitments added early in the third quarter. Chief executive Michael Intrator said in September the company was "largely sold out" of capacity, Bloomberg reported.

Why a 2028 Payoff Strains CoreWeave's Balance Sheet

The catch is timing and cost. Neither Asian market produces revenue before 2028, while the money to build goes out now. CoreWeave spent $6.4 billion on property and equipment in the second quarter alone. Its interest expense, net, of $640 million was five times its $128 million of adjusted operating income, a non-GAAP measure that excludes items including $165 million of stock-based compensation. On a GAAP basis, CoreWeave posted a $49 million operating loss for the quarter. Specialist AI clouds such as Nscale, which has filed to go public, face the same tension between long build cycles and heavy financing.

For India, the deal tests whether demand can fill capacity this large. JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon, speaking at a company conference in India, said hyperscaler AI spending could hit $1 trillion next year. Suppliers are already seeing that spending, with Micron reporting surging data center revenue last week. CoreWeave is betting that local model builders, enterprises and global labs will want Vera Rubin capacity in Navi Mumbai by mid-2028. Until then, investors are paying the interest.