CoreWeave has often been at the whim of investors' shifting sentiment on the artificial-intelligence trade. On Wednesday, the AI cloud company sparked its own vibe shift.

A big jump in CoreWeave's shares kicked off a rally in AI infrastructure stocks, after the company's quarterly report showed sustained and ever-growing demand for computing power.

CoreWeave's sales backlog climbed to $104 billion during the second quarter, the company said Tuesday, not including $25 billion of net new customer commitments added in the early weeks of the current quarter. Revenue climbed to a new record, exceeding Wall Street's expectations.

"Investors underappreciate the opportunity for CoreWeave to develop into a leading hyperscaler," a team of analysts at Raymond James wrote after the report, reiterating a price target of $125 a share. CoreWeave stock rose 19% Wednesday to close at $107.73.

The stock's gains spread to others closely tied to the AI trade: shares of chip maker Micron Technology climbed 4.9% on Wednesday. Competing cloud-computing firm IREN saw its stock jump 9.9%. The S&P 500 information technology sector was the best performing, nudging the broader index to a 0.3% gain.

Nebius Group, a competitor of CoreWeave, also reported earnings on Wednesday, including a 450% year-over-year jump in revenue. The stock surged 34%.

The gains came even as major indexes posted modest moves in the wake of an as-expected report on consumer prices. The Nasdaq composite gained 0.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost less than 0.1%

CoreWeave's business involves buying advanced AI chips from Nvidia, installing them in data centers and leasing out that computing capacity to other firms. The company's stock price has often served as a barometer for the broader AI trade, swinging wildly along with investors' mood.

The demand for computing power -- and the constraints that companies such as CoreWeave must navigate to meet it -- have been a top focus of tech investors this earnings season, analysts said.

"At least for the near term, demand is overwhelming supply," said Ayako Yoshioka, senior investment strategist at the wealth-management firm Wealth Enhancement.

The bear case, on the other hand, is that the massive wave of AI infrastructure spending results in overbuilding. In that scenario, the supply of computing capacity would exceed demand, providers would lose their pricing power, margins would tumble -- and so-called "neocloud" companies like CoreWeave could take the biggest hit.

"We're building so much capacity that there potentially could be a matching issue," said Angelo Zino, senior vice president at CFRA Research. "If that bust comes sooner than many people anticipate, the area of the market that is potentially punished the most would be the neoclouds."

Those concerns have weighed on the stock in the past. Late last year, CoreWeave shares plunged roughly 50% in less than a month, thanks in large part to worries about an AI investing bubble.

One persistent argument in the world of semiconductor finance is how long chips hold their value, and what is the appropriate depreciation schedule for the processors powering AI data centers. On Tuesday, CoreWeave said that it had recently signed a contract at near full price for a batch of Nvidia A100 chips -- a product that was released in 2020 -- that extends through 2029, suggesting that even older generations of AI chips are holding their value well.

Brannin McBee, CoreWeave's co-founder and chief development officer, said in an interview that the deal was "a very good proof point" for the lasting value of older AI chips. He said that demand for these outdated processors was being driven by the need for inference, the type of computing that allows models to respond to queries and that is required to run AI agents, or the autonomous tools favored by coders and businesses.

"Between inference and engineering requirements, it's driving longer lifespans for even older GPUs," McBee said. "We're seeing it across our fleet."

CoreWeave bonds also rallied Wednesday, with the company's 9% notes due in 2031 jumping nearly 3 cents on the dollar to 94.141, according to MarketAxess. That translated to a yield premium, or spread, to U.S. Treasurys of 6.34 percentage points -- down around 0.8 percentage point from Tuesday.

Corporate earnings overall have come in stronger than investors anticipated, easing concerns that the market is dependent on a handful of heavy-spending AI firms. S&P 500 companies are beating estimates by the largest aggregate margin ever, according to FactSet data dating back to 2008.

And for the most part, results have shown that demand for computing power and data-center construction remains intact, Zino said. "I think you've got to be a little more optimistic than you were a month ago."