On this photo illustration, a Core Weave logo is displayed on a smartphone with stock market percentages on the background.
Omar Marques | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
CoreWeave, an Nvidia-backed artificial intelligence startup that rents out chips to other firms, announced Friday that it has a recent $650 million credit line to expand its business and data center portfolio.
The cloud infrastructure company said it’s raised $12.7 billion from equity and debt investors up to now 18 months, including a $1.1 billion round in May at a $19 billion valuation.
By the tip of 2024, CoreWeave plans to have 28 data centers across the U.S. and abroad — including locations in Austin, Texas, Chicago, Las Vegas and London — and it plans to construct one other 10 data centers in 2025. Previously, CoreWeave has supplied Microsoft and French AI startup Mistral with graphics processing units, or GPUs.
As of last yr, CoreWeave reportedly had $2 billion in revenue under contract lined up for 2024.
AI models are notoriously expensive to construct and train, requiring 1000’s of specialised chips that, to this point, have largely come from Nvidia. Most, if not all, tech firms which are power players in AI spend between a whole bunch of 1000’s and billions of dollars on Nvidia chips to make their models work. And along with developing the chips, Nvidia has taken stakes in emerging AI firms like CoreWeave, partly as a solution to be sure its technology gets widely deployed.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley led the financing CoreWeave announced Friday, with participation from Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Jefferies, Mizuho, MUFG and Wells Fargo.
“This credit facility provides additional liquidity to speed up our growth strategy and capitalize on recent opportunities within the rapidly evolving AI space,” Mike Intrator, CoreWeave’s co-founder and CEO, said in a press release.
CoreWeave’s recent credit line is an element of a broader trend, as banks are positioning themselves for a slice of the AI gold rush ahead of numerous potential IPOs within the space. The generative AI market is poised to top $1 trillion in revenue by 2032, in accordance with one estimate.
Last week, OpenAI received a $4 billion revolving line of credit, bringing its total liquidity to greater than $10 billion. The news got here just after OpenAI closed its latest funding round at a $157 billion valuation.
Most of the same banks contributed to OpenAI’s credit line. The startup has an option to extend it by a further $2 billion.
CoreWeave declined to offer details concerning the rate of interest it’s paying or the timeframe for the credit facility.
