AI cloud provider CoreWeave has finalized a $650 million secondary sale, boosting its valuation to $23 billion. This lets early investors and employees cash out some shares ahead of a possible 2025 IPO. Major institutional investors including Jane Street, Magnetar, Fidelity, Macquarie Capital, and Cisco joined the transaction, reinforcing confidence in CoreWeave's AI-optimized cloud platform.
Why it matters: CoreWeave is carving out a niche as a key player in the AI infrastructure space, competing with tech giants like Amazon and Google. By focusing on reselling NVIDIA’s high-performance GPUs, CoreWeave’s platform meets the surging demand for compute power in AI workloads, spurred by the rise of generative AI applications.
The backstory: CoreWeave’s AI-focused cloud platform offers scalable data centers equipped with powerful NVIDIA GPUs, including the H200 models, which handle data-intensive AI processes. Each AI cluster integrates NVIDIA GPUs with Bluefield-3 processors for efficient network management and Intel CPUs for additional processing, enabling high-performance infrastructure tailored for complex AI workloads.
In May, it was valued at $19 billion following a Series C round led by Coatue, and just last month, it has secured a $650 million credit facility and announced a substantial $8.7 billion, 12-year data center partnership with bitcoin miner Core Scientific.
What’s next: As CoreWeave scales, it plans to expand from 28 to 38 cloud facilities by next year, with recent investments supporting new data centers in Europe and future facilities in the U.K.
Zoom out: CoreWeave’s momentum reflects growing investor interest in the AI infrastructure sector, with more companies and investors betting on high-performance, AI-dedicated cloud services as the foundation for the next wave of digital transformation.