CoreWeave made its debut on the Nasdaq on Friday, with its stock opening at $39 and closing at $40, after the company sold shares at $40 each, which was below the expected range. The company raised $1.5 billion in its initial public offering (IPO), making it the largest tech IPO in the U.S. since 2021.
This IPO has garnered significant attention as CoreWeave is the first pure-play artificial intelligence (AI) IPO and represents the largest tech debut in four years. The IPO market had been largely stagnant since the end of 2021, with the tech industry grappling with rising inflation and interest rates. Despite the excitement around CoreWeave, the market conditions didn’t help, as the Nasdaq index was down almost 3% on the day of the debut and is facing its worst quarterly performance since mid-2022.
CoreWeave, a key supplier to OpenAI, has benefited from the surge in generative AI that started with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. The company’s biggest customer is Microsoft, which accounts for 62% of CoreWeave’s $1.92 billion in revenue from last year. CoreWeave rents out access to Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to major tech and AI companies, including Meta, IBM, and Cohere, competing with cloud giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle.
The company reported a net loss of $863 million last year, but its revenue soared by 737% compared to the previous year. The business is capital-intensive due to the high costs of operating data centers, and CoreWeave has raised nearly $13 billion in debt, much of it directed towards GPUs for its leased facilities worldwide. Initially aiming to raise $2.5 billion with a price target of $47 to $55 per share, the company scaled down its offering in response to investor skepticism and macroeconomic challenges.
CoreWeave’s IPO is the largest tech debut since UiPath’s $1.57 billion IPO in 2021. Following its filing with the SEC, other companies like Hinge Health, Klarna, and StubHub have followed with IPOs, signaling a potential surge in AI-related public offerings.
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Livingston, New Jersey. The company had 881 employees at the end of 2024. Before the IPO, CEO Michael Intrator controlled 38% of CoreWeave’s voting power, and Nvidia held 1%. Other investors include Fidelity and Magnetar.
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