CoreWeave has signed a five-year, $11.9 billion deal with OpenAI to provide artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure services ahead of its much-anticipated initial public offering.
As part of the deal announced Tuesday, OpenAI will receive $350 million in shares of CoreWeave, a cloud infrastructure startup backed by NVIDIA Corp., through a private placement. The stake is tied to CoreWeave’s planned IPO in the coming weeks, a public offering that would value the company at more than $35 billion, Reuters reported.
In an IPO prospectus filing, CoreWeave reported $1.92 billion in revenue last year, up more than 700% from $228.9 million in 2023. The company revealed about two-thirds of its 2024 revenue came from Microsoft Corp., which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI. CoreWeave’s loss widened to $863.4 million last year from $593.7 million in 2023.
“Partnering with OpenAI on this net new contract underscores CoreWeave’s proven ability to deliver reliable and performant infrastructure services, powering AI innovations for world-leading AI labs,” Michael Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, said in a statement. “We remain a partner-of-choice to meet the bleeding-edge needs of pioneers to unleash AI’s potential to change the world.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called CoreWeave “an important addition to OpenAI’s infrastructure portfolio, complementing our commercial deals with Microsoft and Oracle, and our joint venture with Softbank on Stargate.”
Stargate is the $500 billion AI infrastructure project announced between OpenAI, Oracle Corp. and SoftBank at a White House press conference hosted by President Donald Trump in January. The initiative is intended to build out AI data centers and manufacturing facilities in the U.S. over the past four years, though critics — including Elon Musk — doubt the project will come anywhere near its full funding.
Oracle and OpenAI plan to start filling a sprawling new data center in Abilene, Texas, with tens of thousands of AI chips from NVIDIA as part of Stargate, according to a Bloomberg report.
In many ways, CoreWeave checks the boxes on AI and data center expansion. The 8-year-old company started as a provider of graphics processing units (GPUs) for crypto-miners before transitioning to a cloud infrastructure supplier of GPUs to Microsoft, Meta Platforms Inc., IBM Corp., and Cohere Inc.
In its prospectus, CoreWeave’s said it ended 2024 with 32 data centers housing more than 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
Backed by NVIDIA, CoreWeave has raised more than $12 billion in funding over the past two years, including a $1.1 billion round in May that valued it at $19 billion. It revealed a $650 million line of credit in October to expand its data center portfolio, according to a CNBC report.
CoreWeave said it also expects to complete an acquisition of Weights & Biases, a developer platform for AI, in the first half of 2025.
