Artificial Intelligence (AI) heavyweight OpenAI, has entered into a strategic deal worth US$ 11.9 billion with CoreWeave, a provider of cloud and data center solutions for AI companies. As part of this deal, OpenAI will become an investor in CoreWeave through the issuance of US$ 350 million of CoreWeave stock. The aim is to expand OpenAI’s compute capacity for training and delivering its latest models at scale.
Readers would recall that CoreWeave has an Initial Public Offering (IPO) coming up this year, and is reportedly aiming for a valuation of US$ 35 billion. CoreWeave runs 32 AI data centers powered by over 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs. In fact, NVIDIA holds a 6 percent stake in CoreWeave.
Explaining the rationale behind the deal, Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI, said, “Advanced AI systems require reliable compute, and we’re excited to continue scaling with CoreWeave so we can train even more powerful models and offer great services to even more users.” He further explained, “CoreWeave is an important addition to OpenAI’s infrastructure portfolio, complementing our commercial deals with Microsoft and Oracle, and our joint venture with Softbank on Stargate.”
“Partnering with OpenAI on this new contract underscores CoreWeave’s proven ability to deliver reliable and performant infrastructure services, powering AI Innovations for world-leading AI labs,” said Michael Intrator, Co-Founder and CEO, CoreWeave.
Since 2017, CoreWeave has operated a growing footprint of data centers across the US and Europe. Thus far, CoreWeave’s biggest clients include Microsoft, Meta and IBM.