CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator, left, testifies before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in Washington on May 8, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence-oriented cloud infrastructure company CoreWeave said Monday it will acquire Core Scientific, a data center infrastructure provider, in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $9 billion.
CoreWeave stock was down about 2% in trading on Monday afternoon, while Core Scientific stock was about 16% lower. Shares of both companies rallied at the end of June after the Wall Street Journal reported that talks were underway for an acquisition.
“I think that, like many things that we do, it takes the market some time to internalize the value proposition that we are representing to the market and how it all fits together,” CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator told CNBC in an interview.
In a presentation to investors, CoreWeave said the move will eliminate $10 billion in future lease obligations and significantly enhance operating efficiency.
“We’re not paying rent, right, for the next 15 years,” Intrator said.
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, pending regulatory and shareholder approval.
The deal expands CoreWeave’s access to power and real estate, giving it ownership of 1.3 gigawatts of gross capacity across Core Scientific’s U.S. data center footprint, with another gigawatt available for future growth.
Of Core Scientific’s 1.3 gigawatts, 840 megawatts are allocated to CoreWeave’s contracts at five locations, Nitin Agrawal, CoreWeave’s finance chief, said on a call with analysts. After the deal closes, CoreWeave said it will be able to choose to divest Core Scientific’s cryptocurrency mining business, which was responsible for 89% of Core Scientific’s first-quarter revenue, or make it ready to handle AI workloads.
“We have gone through the conversion process,” Intrator said. The cost associated with converting cryptocurrency sites is less than it is for setting up new AI data centers, he said.
Plus, CoreWeave will be able to pursue investments from infrastructure-oriented vehicles and other sources that could result in a lower cost of capital, Agrawal said. As of March 31, CoreWeave’s weighted average rate on its short-term debt was 10.1%.
Core Scientific has increasingly focused on high-performance compute workloads since emerging from bankruptcy and relisting on the Nasdaq in 2024. It employs over 300 people. It has worked with CoreWeave since 2018, Intrator said.
CoreWeave went public in March, and even after Monday’s pullback, its shares are worth four times more than they were at it was looking to join the Nasdaq.
When CoreWeave began working on infrastructure for AI, some people said the company should be building its own data centers, but it would have been a difficult pitch to investors, Intrator said.
But now CoreWeave is a public company, with nearly $1 billion in quarterly revenue and a broad investor base. It’s constructing its own data centers, separate from Core Scientific, as it competes with major cloud infrastructure sellers such as Amazon Web Services.
“When you look at the hyperscalers, they have some infrastructure that they build, and they have some infrastructure that they use third parties to deliver, and there’s a reason that they do that, and those reasons kind of are applicable to us, too, and so that’s what you’re seeing,” Intrator said.
Shareholders of Core Scientific will receive 0.1235 CoreWeave shares for each share they hold. That implies a $20.40 per-share valuation and a 66% premium to Core Scientific’s closing stock price before deal talks were reported.
After the deal closes, Core Scientific shareholders will own less than 10% of the combined company.
The two companies could have come together earlier. Last year Core Scientific said it had rejected CoreWeave’s unsolicited offer to buy all outstanding shares.
