Key takeaways
- CoreWeave signs a five-year, $11.9 billion agreement with OpenAI for AI infrastructure services.
- OpenAI will receive $350 million in CoreWeave shares during its planned IPO.
- CoreWeave's revenue surged to $1.92 billion in 2024, largely driven by Microsoft.
- Company prepares for an IPO with lead underwriters Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs.
- CoreWeave is negotiating to acquire Weights & Biases, expected to finalize in early 2025.
NVIDIA-backed hyperscaler AI startup CoreWeave has signed a five-year agreement valued at $11.9 billion with OpenAI. Under the agreement, CoreWeave will provide AI infrastructure services to OpenAI. The announcement was first reported by Reuters.
As part of the arrangement, OpenAI will receive $350 million in CoreWeave shares through a private placement. The share issuance will take place at the time of CoreWeave’s planned initial public offering.
“CoreWeave is an important addition to OpenAI’s infrastructure portfolio, complementing our commercial deals with Microsoft and Oracle, and our joint venture with SoftBank on Stargate,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly said.
The report also suggests that CoreWeave’s revenue increased to $1.92 billion in 2024 from $228.9 million in 2023, and loss widened to $863.4 million from $593.7 million. Microsoft accounted for about two-thirds of CoreWeave’s 2024 revenue.
CoreWeave, founded in 2017, is a cloud infrastructure company equipping companies with GPU computing power. It started as a GPU provider for crypto-miners and then broke into the ranks of hyperscalers in a short period of time. Now it is gearing up for an IPO listing. Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters for this.
CoreWeave provides access to data centres and compute resources for AI workloads. Its services are based on hardware supplied by NVIDIA.
CoreWeave was also in talks to acquire Weights & Biases, a developer platform for AI. The company expects to close the acquisition in the first half of 2025.
