CoreWeave

What CoreWeave is

CoreWeave is a cloud computing company headquartered in Livingston, New Jersey, that rents out graphics processing units (GPUs) — the chips used to train and run large AI models — rather than selling them. Customers reach the machines over the network and pay for the computing time they consume, much as they would rent ordinary servers from a conventional cloud provider.^[1][5]

From ethereum miner to GPU cloud

The company was founded in 2017 in New Jersey by three commodities traders, Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee, together with Peter Salanki.^[1] It was originally known as Atlantic Crypto and operated as a cryptocurrency miner, using GPUs to mine ethereum.^[1] Mining rewards scale with raw computational throughput, so a miner's main asset is a large stock of graphics cards.

After the 2018 cryptocurrency crash made that business far less attractive, the company changed direction. It was renamed CoreWeave in 2019 and began renting out its GPU inventory as cloud computing infrastructure.^[1] Hardware bought for one purpose became a service other companies could buy.

Financing the build-out

CoreWeave's expansion was financed with a mixture of equity and debt, and a notable feature of the debt was that GPUs themselves served as collateral. In April 2023 NVIDIA invested $100 million in the company,^[1] and by May 2023 CoreWeave was valued at around $2 billion.^[1] In August 2023 it secured a $2.3 billion debt financing facility led by Magnetar Capital and Blackstone, using NVIDIA H100 GPUs as collateral.^[1]

The pace quickened in 2024. On 1 May 2024 the company announced a $1.1 billion Series C round led by Coatue, valuing it at $19 billion, up from $7 billion a few months earlier.^[2] In May 2024 it closed a $7.5 billion debt facility led by Blackstone, which the company described as the largest private debt financing of all time.^[3] By around May 2024, counting the $1.1 billion Series C, a $642 million secondary sale in December 2023 and a $420 million round in April 2023, CoreWeave had raised about $12 billion in equity and debt in total.^[3]

Public listing and customers

On 23 March 2025 CoreWeave announced an $11.9 billion agreement to provide AI infrastructure to OpenAI; OpenAI also invested $350 million in the company.^[4] CoreWeave went public on the Nasdaq on 28 March 2025.^[5] Its revenue base was highly concentrated: Microsoft accounted for 62% of its $1.92 billion revenue in 2024, a year in which the company lost $863 million.^[5]

Why it matters

Two things about CoreWeave's history stand out. First, it shows how demand for AI computing turned GPU capacity into an asset that can be borrowed against: the same chips used to run models were pledged as security for billions of dollars of debt.^[1] Second, the figures around its listing show the economics of that model — very large capital requirements, revenue concentrated in a small number of customers, and losses alongside rapid growth.^[3][5] The company's route from crypto miner to listed AI infrastructure provider follows the wider shift of investment toward computing power for machine learning.