What CEOs Are Saying: The AI Infrastructure Buildout Continues
Three Q1 earnings calls from CoreWeave, IonQ, and Cloudflare
In this edition
Q-Day coming faster than expected
Prophylactic layoffs at a growing company
Non-human internet traffic to outpace human traffic next year?
The first investment-grade bond backed by AI data centers
Quote of the week
“Just because you’re fit doesn’t mean you can’t get fitter.”
— Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, on a 20% workforce reduction
The spending spree on AI infrastructure has no end in sight.
As of this week, the five largest US hyperscalers (Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, have committed more than $700B to AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. Less covered than this spending itself is the army of smaller, more specialized companies that rent out GPUs, build the chips, and run the networks the hyperscalers depend on in the era of AI.
Three of them reported this week, and each one is doing something striking to secure their place in the game. CoreWeave, an AI-focused cloud provider, is borrowing tens of billions of dollars at investment-grade rates to build data centers years before a the hoped-for payoff arrives. IonQ, a quantum computing company, is letting gross margins compress as it spends its way into a chip foundry acquisition. And Cloudflare, which runs much of the internet's network layer, laid off 20% of its workforce on the same day it reported its strongest customer additions in years.
Let’s hear what these CEOs had to say to investors and analysts.
