CoreWeave, a provider of cloud-based Nvidia processors to companies including Meta and Microsoft, is headed for the public market.
In its IPO prospectus on Monday, CoreWeave said revenue in 2024 soared more than 700% to $1.92 billion. The company recorded a net loss of $863.4 million. In 2024, 62% of CoreWeave’s revenue came from Microsoft. CoreWeave filed to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol “CRWV.”
In the fourth quarter, CoreWeave generated $747.4 million of revenue, with a gross margin, or the revenue left after accounting for the cost of goods sold, of about 76%. The company recorded operating income of $112.7 million, but a net loss of $51.4 million, due to interest expenses.
Originally known as Atlantic Crypto, CoreWeave got its start in 2017 by offering infrastructure for mining the ethereum cryptocurrency. After digital currency prices fell, the company bought up additional graphics processing units (GPUs) and changed its name to CoreWeave, with an increasing focus on graphics rendering and artificial intelligence.
“We quickly started getting inundated with introductions to businesses dependent upon GPU acceleration with a common pain point: legacy cloud providers make it extremely difficult to scale because they offer a limited variety of compute options at monopolistic prices,” co-founder and CEO Brian Intrator wrote in a 2021 blog post.
Intrator controls about 38% of the company’s voting power before the offering. Hedge fund Magnetar controls 7%, while Nvidia has 1%, the filing showed.
At the end of 2024, CoreWeave’s fleet included over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs, according to the filing. It does not offer GPUs from rival AMD. Running data centers full of GPUs requires considerable energy. CoreWeave had 360 megawatts in active power, and a total of 1.3 gigawatts had been contracted, the filing said.
Morgan Stanley is leading the offering, with help from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.
CoreWeave will be attempting to enter the public market during a historically slow stretch for tech offerings.
When cloud software vendor ServiceTitan hit the market in December, it market the first significant venture-backed tech IPO since Rubrik’s debut in April. A month before that, Reddit started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
There haven’t been many other tech IPOs of note in the U.S. since late 2021, when rising interest rates and soaring inflation pushed investors out of risky assets.
Within the AI infrastructure market, one other name of interest is Cerebras. The chipmaker filed to go public in September, but the process slowed down due to a review by the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS.
CoreWeave gained popularity after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, because the company could quickly provide GPUs to businesses in need. Microsoft, whose Azure cloud unit has supplied computing power to OpenAI, started working with CoreWeave in 2023 to meet OpenAI demand.
“What happened In November of ’22, like, that was just a bolt from the blue, right?” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on a podcast released in November with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley. “So therefore, we had to catch up. So we said, Hey, we’re not going to in fact worry about too much inefficiency.”
Nadella described the GPU cloud leasing as a one-time event, saying Microsoft was no longer short on chips. But on a more recent podcast, the Microsoft chief said the company builds and rents heavily and will still be leasing in 2027 and 2028.
In addition to being the CoreWeave’s top client, Microsoft is also a competitor, along with Amazon, Google, Oracle, and some smaller providers such as Crusoe and Lambda.
Nvidia relies on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for GPU fabrication, and military conflict involving China and Taiwan could pose issues for CoreWeave, the company said in Monday’s filing.
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— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
