OpenAI books another 4 billion US dollars in AI computing time at CoreWeave

CoreWeave will provide cloud computing capacity worth up to USD 4 billion to OpenAI over the next four years. The data centre operator, which has close ties to Microsoft, specializes in the training and execution (inference) of AI models. The company primarily relies on GPU accelerators from Nvidia. OpenAI has already pumped 11.9 billion dollars into CoreWeave, with billions more to come in the form of an order for AI computing time.

In the previous billion-dollar investment in CoreWeave, OpenAI secured shares in the company shortly before the data center operator went public at the end of March. CoreWeave is also closely linked to Microsoft, which also provides OpenAI with substantial financial support. In 2024, CoreWeave generated 62 percent of its annual revenue with servers for Microsoft. This corresponds to just under 1.2 billion of a good 1.9 billion dollars. All other customers previously accounted for less than 10 percent of revenue. In the first quarter of this year, Microsoft even accounted for 72 percent of turnover, according to a statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

CoreWeave's IPO initially disappointing

Despite this support, the IPO was less successful than hoped. CoreWeave was able to raise 1.5 billion dollars in the IPO (Initial Public Offering), but had hoped for 4 billion dollars, writes Yahoo! Finance. After all, the share price of the data center operator has risen by almost 68 percent since the IPO at the end of March – i.e., within just one and a half months.

However, CoreWeave is still in the red. According to a company statement, the operating loss in the first quarter was 27.5 million dollars and the net loss was 314.6 million dollars – on a turnover of 981.6 million dollars in the first three months of this year. This is probably due to investments in the company's own systems.

CoreWeave fully relies on Nvidia's AI accelerator

Since mid-April, thousands of Blackwell GPUs have been available to CoreWeave customers for training and executing reasoning models and AI agents. According to Nvidia, GB200-NVL72 rack systems are used for this. However, this is apparently not enough. “The demand for the product we're delivering is really insatiable,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator told Bloomberg. The data center operator will therefore bring forward planned investments. This year alone, these are expected to amount to up to 23 billion dollars.

The stock market reacted with some sharp jumps in the CoreWeave share price. The share price rose by around 8 percent, but also fell by almost 9 percent before CoreWeave closed the trading day down around 2.5 percent. After the close of trading, however, the share gained almost 1.9 percent in value again.

(fds)