AI cloud platform CoreWeave has applied to go public. The company, which specializes in offering GPU infrastructure for AI workloads, is aiming for a valuation of up to 26 billion dollars in the planned IPO.
CoreWeave wants to issue 49 million shares at a price between 47 and 55 dollars each. At the highest price, this would value the company at 26 billion dollars. According to Bloomberg, the company had originally aimed for a capital injection of 4 billion dollars at a valuation of 35 billion dollars. Despite this downward adjustment, the IPO has already been oversubscribed: there is more demand for shares than supply.
Impressive infrastructure
The cloud provider manages more than 250,000 Nvidia graphics cards in 32 data centers worldwide. CoreWeave is one of the few providers that supply the Blackwell B200, Nvidia’s newest and most powerful AI accelerator. It also offers workstation-grade Nvidia cards optimized for rendering tasks.
The company claims that its platform delivers better performance for AI workloads than the large public clouds. According to the IPO application, Llama 3.1 can be trained on the CoreWeave platform with 3.1 million fewer GPU hours than with an unnamed competitor. The company also promises to significantly speed up LLMs loading on Nvidia chips.
Proprietary software innovations
CoreWeave has developed several proprietary software tools for its platform. One of these, SUNK, is designed to help companies make their cloud-based AI environments more efficient.
Companies often use Kubernetes for their inference workloads and another open-source tool, Slurm, for AI training. These two tools usually have to be deployed on separate server clusters. SUNK makes it possible to run Slurm on Kubernetes, eliminating customers needing to maintain two separate server clusters.
Impressive customer base
CoreWeave’s functionality has helped the company to close deals with several large tech companies. Its customers include OpenAI, Meta, IBM and Microsoft. Last year, Microsoft accounted for 62 percent of the 1.9 billion dollars in revenue that CoreWeave generated.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, the company has experienced explosive sales growth. Sales increased by 737 percent in 2024 and even 1,346 percent (!) the year before. CoreWeave is investing heavily to maintain this growth: the loss widened from 594 million dollars in 2023 to 594 million dollars last year.
Future plans
In its IPO application, CoreWeave indicates that it intends to maintain revenue growth by expanding its international presence. The company also plans to launch industry-specific solutions for sectors such as banking, where it expects increasing demand for AI. “Although it is still early days, we are already seeing strong interest from these industries,” the application states.
The company’s plan to improve its financial performance could also include changes to its data center strategy. CoreWeave currently leases most of its cloud facilities. The IPO application states that it “may make investments” to take more ownership interests in its data centers. It hopes that “this will give us more control and responsibility over the delivery time of new construction projects, and give us more control over our data center costs.” Reducing infrastructure costs could help the company move closer to profitability.
CoreWeave will list its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CRWV.
Also read: A storm has formed around CoreWeave