CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider renowned for its large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads, has announced securing an impressive $2.3 billion debt facility. The startup is strategically positioned to capitalize on the booming generative AI industry with its GPU cloud services. The newly acquired financing will be utilized to purchase additional computing resources to cater to its growing customer base, establish new data centers, and expand its workforce. Magnetar Capital and funds managed by Blackstone led the funding round, with participation from prominent asset management firms like Coatue and DigitalBridge Credit, as well as support from BlackRock, PIMCO, and Carlyle.
Michael Intrator, CoreWeave’s CEO and co-founder, expressed his excitement about AI’s transformative potential and how the company’s reliable, flexible, and high-performance compute resources are driving the industry forward. He stated that the confidence shown by world-class investors is a validation of their past achievements and future strategy.
Jasvinder Khaira, a Senior Managing Director at Blackstone, acknowledged the significant investment required in specialized GPU cloud infrastructure to meet the soaring computing demand from generative AI. In this regard, CoreWeave stands out as a clear leader powering innovation.
Remarkably, CoreWeave has rapidly risen to prominence in recent months. Brannin McBee, the company’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, emphasized that they have come a long way in a short time. With over $400 million in new funding, a state-of-the-art $1.6 billion data center in Plano, Texas, and the world’s fastest AI supercomputer developed in collaboration with Nvidia, CoreWeave’s fortunes have seen a remarkable shift since its inception as an Ethereum mining company in 2017.
In 2019, the founders astutely pivoted to develop a specialized cloud infrastructure with GPU acceleration at scale, which proved to be timely as the demand for GPUs surged due to advancements in language models like ChatGPT and generative AI. CoreWeave has successfully catered to the needs of large language model companies like Inflection AI.
McBee shared impressive revenue figures, revealing that the company achieved $30 million in revenue last year, expects $500 million this year, and has nearly $2 billion in contracted revenue for the following year. Notably, Microsoft has also recognized CoreWeave’s potential, committing to spend billions on their cloud computing infrastructure.
The company’s success can also be attributed to Nvidia’s strategy to maintain dominance in the AI space. Nvidia has generously allocated its latest AI server chips to CoreWeave, diverting them from other top cloud providers like AWS. This has been particularly advantageous as competitors are developing their AI chips to reduce dependence on Nvidia.
McBee acknowledged that not building their own chips has actually worked in CoreWeave’s favor, making it easier for them to obtain more GPUs from Nvidia compared to their peers. The company has emerged as one of the largest players in this rapidly expanding infrastructure space, despite being relatively unknown just a few months ago.
