CoreWeave goes public on the Nasdaq at $40 a share

Background

An initial public offering (IPO) is the step in which a private company sells shares to outside investors for the first time and lists them on a stock exchange, raising capital and giving existing shareholders a public market price. CoreWeave, a cloud computing company whose business is built around AI infrastructure, began that process on 3 March 2025, when it filed its IPO registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing set out a plan to list Class A common stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol CRWV.^[3]

The offering

CoreWeave initially set a price range of $47 to $55 per share, then slimmed the offering. NVIDIA anchored the deal at $40 per share with a $250 million order.^[1][2] An anchor order is a large subscription commitment made before trading begins, giving the banks running the deal a firm block of demand to price against. The company sold shares at $40 each and raised $1.5 billion, the biggest US technology IPO since UiPath's debut in 2021.^[1]

Trading began on 28 March 2025. The stock opened at $39, below the offer price, and closed flat at $40 on the Nasdaq.^[1]

The financial picture

At the IPO, Microsoft accounted for 62% of CoreWeave's $1.92 billion in 2024 revenue. The company reported a $863 million net loss for 2024, a year in which revenue rose 737%.^[1] Rapid growth, a large loss and a single customer accounting for most of the top line all appeared in the same set of numbers.

NVIDIA was more than an anchor investor. According to the chipmaker's filing, it owned about $900 million of CoreWeave stock at the end of March 2025.^[2]

Deals signed before the listing

Before the IPO, CoreWeave had announced an $11.9 billion AI infrastructure agreement with OpenAI, and OpenAI was to invest $350 million in CoreWeave through a private placement during the IPO.^[3][1]

Pricing a deal to demand

CEO Michael Intrator said on CNBC's Squawk Box that the company had to "scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was".^[1] The sequence fits that description: a range of $47 to $55, a $40 anchor price, an opening trade at $39 and a close back at $40. Cutting a price range or shrinking a deal is a standard response when demand at the marketed price is thinner than expected; the alternative is to press ahead and risk a weak first day.

Why it matters

The listing was the largest US technology IPO since UiPath's debut in 2021, which put the scale of the AI infrastructure build-out in front of public-market investors.^[1] It also made CoreWeave's dependence on Microsoft a matter of public record rather than a detail known mainly to private investors: 62% of 2024 revenue came from one customer.^[1] And the capital relationships around the company were unusual enough to be worth noting on their own — OpenAI's planned $350 million private placement ran alongside the IPO, and NVIDIA both anchored the offering and held about $900 million of the stock at the end of March 2025.^[1][2]

The first day's trading gave a clear reading of how the deal was received: shares opened below the $40 offer price and finished the session exactly where they were sold.^[1]