CoreWeave: Cisco of the AI Era?

Early 2000, the Dow Theory Letters – a reputable financial publication – published an issue titled “Unsustainable Valuations.”

At the top of the list was Cisco: a company with market cap $452 billion, trading at P/E near 150x, expected growth 30%/year.
Adjusted to current value, that figure is equivalent to $844 billion.

Cisco at that time was truly a giant.

Throughout the 1990s, the company led in connecting disparate computer networks thanks to the invention of the router – the device that opened the global internet era.
Revenue exploded from $70 million in 1990 to $19 billion in 2000, average growth rate 66%/year.
At that time, Cisco was not at all a “dotcom bubble”. It was a real business with real profits.

But then expectations no longer matched reality.

Technology advanced, router replacement capabilities grew, and thousands of competitors racing to expand infrastructure turned seemingly infinite demand into oversupply.
Cisco went from growth star to symbol of bubble burst.

This historical lesson reappears when looking at CoreWeave today:

An infrastructure product at the center of the AI revolution.
Triple-digit growth rate, revenue from $16 million in 2022 to $1.9 billion in 2024.
Special relationship with Nvidia, major customers like Microsoft, OpenAI.
And by the end of March 2025, CoreWeave officially IPOs on Nasdaq - $CRWV, raising over $1.4 billion at $40/share, pushing company valuation over $35 billion.
- This is seen as one of the most notable tech deals of 2025 and a key test of market confidence in the “AI wave.”

The question is: Is CoreWeave the Cisco of the 1990s – a truly solid business – or the seed of a new bubble?

In today's analysis, Viet Hustler will explore with readers CoreWeave's business model, competition, finances, prospects, and risks.

Comments (0)