Cleveland-Cliffs' $575M Q3 EBITDA Doubles From Q2 — AI Data Centers Are Pulling US Steel, but 14x Net Leverage Is Why the Stock Still Sits at $12

Cleveland-Cliffs reports Q3 2026 before U.S. markets open on October 19, guided to roughly $575M of adjusted EBITDA — more than double the $286M it actually booked in Q2 and four times the $143M it printed in Q3 2025. Management tied the step-up to about $55 per net ton of higher flat-rolled pricing and roughly 300,000 additional net tons of shipments, both of which are now visible in the tape: hot-rolled coil traded at $1,356/ton on the morning of the print, up 67% YoY, and Cleveland-Cliffs's own Q2 average net selling price had already moved to $1,124/ton, up 10.7% YoY.

Of the demand vectors inside the Q3 print, Grain-Oriented Electrical Steel — the specialty grade that goes into transformer cores and is the one commodity inside Cleveland-Cliffs's portfolio that no other US-listed producer supplies at scale — is the cleanest read-through to AI/data-center buildout. A 2025 industry assessment identified Cleveland-Cliffs as the only major domestic supplier of GOES, a bottleneck the 50% Section 232 tariff now protects from import substitution.

The flat-rolled pricing tailwinds flowing through Q3 land on a balance sheet that is the structural mirror image of Nucor's and Steel Dynamics's. Cleveland-Cliffs carries $7.70B of long-term debt and just $70M of cash on June 30, 2026, against trailing-twelve-month EBITDA of $546M — a net-leverage ratio near 14x. Nucor and Steel Dynamics sit at 0.8x and 1.2x respectively, which is why their forward P/Es (11.4x and 10.0x) are inside a normal range while Cleveland-Cliffs's trailing P/E is negative and its EV/EBITDA is 26.6x on depressed TTM EBITDA.

The investor takeaway from the spread is that the AI-steel demand thesis is asymmetric by balance-sheet quality. Nucor and Steel Dynamics get a cleaner read on flat-rolled price recovery without the leverage drag, and their Q3 prints — Steel Dynamics on October 20 and Nucor on October 26 — will be the easier comparables to read. Cleveland-Cliffs is the only one of the three with material GOES exposure, and that is the captive piece of the story the broader EAF comp set cannot replicate.