Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, gestures during the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
CoreWeave, a seller of artificial intelligence technology in the cloud, is set to make its Nasdaq debut on Friday. The company priced shares at $40 in its IPO on Thursday, below its expected range, raising $1.5 billion.
The offering has captured the attention of investors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, as CoreWeave represents the first pure-play AI IPO and the largest tech debut in the U.S. in four years. The IPO market has been largely shut since the end of 2021, as the tech industry reckoned with rising inflation and interest rates.
As a supplier to OpenAI, CoreWeave is among the beneficiaries of the generative AI boom that began with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Microsoft, which provides cloud services to OpenAI, is CoreWeave’s biggest customer, accounting for 62% of the company’s $1.92 billion in revenue last year.
CoreWeave rents out access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units to other large tech and AI companies including Meta, IBM and Cohere. Its stiffest competition is coming from the top cloud vendors — Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle.
CoreWeave reported a net loss of $863 million last year, with revenue soaring 737% from a year earlier. It’s a capital-intensive business due to the high costs of renting out and operating data centers. CoreWeave has raised almost $13 billion in debt, with much of that allocated for GPUs that go inside the company’s leased facilities in the U.S. and abroad.
After initially setting its price target at $47 to $55, with a plan to raise about $2.5 billion at the middle of the range, CoreWeave slimmed down the offering, a reflection of investor skepticism.
“There’s a lot of headwinds in the macro,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “And we definitely had to scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was.”
Few tech companies have debuted on U.S. exchanges in recent years. There were just 13 venture-backed technology IPOs in 2022, 2023 and 2024 combined, compared with 77 in the record year of 2021, according to data from Jay Ritter, an emeritus professor of finance at the University of Florida.
CoreWeave’s offering is the largest U.S. IPO since automation software maker UiPath‘s $1.57 billion New York Stock Exchange debut in 2021.
Since CoreWeave filed its prospectus with the SEC on March 3, digital physical therapy company Hinge Health, Swedish online lender Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub have followed. Discord, which runs popular chat software, has hired banks for an IPO, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
Should the deal trade well, CoreWeave’s arrival on Nasdaq might inspire an “AI parade” to the public markets, Mark Klein, CEO of SuRo Capital, which invests in private companies, told CNBC earlier.
Data analytics company Databricks, which partly generates revenue by running AI models on behalf of clients, announced a funding round at a $62 billion valuation in December. OpenAI was closing in on a funding round at a $260 billion valuation last month.
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and is based in Livingston, New Jersey. The company had 881 employees at the end of 2024. Prior to the IPO, Intrator controlled 38% of CoreWeave’s voting power, while Nvidia held 1%. Other investors include Fidelity and Magnetar.
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