CoreWeave

CoreWeave is a GPUaaS provider headquartered in New Jersey. They build or lease datacenters, buy GPU clusters from companies like Dell, and sell access to those clusters on a consumptive basis to customers. They were founded in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto and focused on mining Ethereum cryptocurrency using NVIDIA GPUs

Business model

In practice, CoreWeave’s unit of sale are whole clusters for fixed terms. CoreWeave customers rent a whole GPU cluster from CoreWeave for a term of four years on average;¹ they prepay 15-25% of the total contract value up-front, then pay the remainder on a monthly basis.¹ In exchange, CoreWeave will manage the hardware lifecycle and provide an SLA that guarantees you exclusive access to a subset of those GPUs (perhaps 95%) each month.

At the end of contract terms, CoreWeave repurposes Gen N-1 GPUs for inferencing.¹

Technology

Hardware

CoreWeave uses Dell hardware for their GB200 NVL72 racks.²

Software

CoreWeave exposes GPU resources through a Kubernetes interface. As far as I know, there is no VM service, because their nodes are bare-metal.

LOTA (Local Object Transfer Accelerator is their in-house object storage cache.³

Customers

Microsoft is CoreWeave’s largest customer, which has allegedly committed $10 billion in GPU capacity between 2023 and 2030 over at least five different contracts.⁴⁵ Microsoft accounted for $81 million (35% of CoreWeave’s revenue) in 2023 and $1.2 billion (62% of its revenue) in 2024, driven by a Master Services Agreement signed in February 2023.¹

Other notable customers include:

• Oracle Cloud⁵
• Meta⁵¹
• IBM is also using a CoreWeave cluster for training its Granite model.⁶
• NVIDIA has also stated that it uses clusters in CoreWeave for internal R&D.⁴
• Cohere¹
• Mistral¹
• Magnetar Capital, CoreWeave’s lead investor, also pays for GPU capacity from CoreWeave for its portfolio companies.¹
• Jane Street, also an investor, trains its models on CoreWeave clusters.¹

CoreWeave will also be building a datacenter for Canadian sovereign AI in partnership with Cohere.⁷

Finances

Investors

CoreWeave has relied heavily on debt financing (e.g., taking out loans on collateral, like a mortgage) to fund their acquisition of GPUs and datacenters. As of their S-1 filing in March 2025, they had $7.93 billion in total debt (see F-34 of their S-1¹), and the following table summarizes these loans and lines of credit (not all have been drawn):¹

Loan Type	Amount ($B)	Maturity	Interest Rate (Estimated)	Collateral
Delayed Draw Term Loan 1.0	2.01	Mar 2028	15%	GPUs
Delayed Draw Term Loan 2.0	3.84	May 2029	11%	GPUs
Term Loan Facility	1.00	Dec 2025	12%
OEM Financing	1.3	Feb 2026 – Oct 2027	9% – 11%	GPUs
Revolving Credit Facility	0.65	Jun 2027	7.00% or 6.75%

CoreWeave has also raised $2 billion in equity (e.g., selling shares to investors).⁵ They closed a $1.1 billion Series C in May 2024.⁸

Magnetar Capital allegedly owns about 20% of CoreWeave’s equity,¹ and NVIDIA owns less than 5%.⁵¹ Other investors include Coatue Management, Jane Street, Fidelity, and Lykos Global Management.⁵ Debt financing also included funds from Carlyle, CDPQ, and DigitalBridge Credit.⁸

Revenue

CoreWeave allegedly had $1.915 billion in revenue in 2024,¹ up from $228.9 million in 2023 and $25 million in 2022.¹

Capital expenses

In 2024, CoreWeave spent $8.7 billion in infrastructure (which includes software), up from $3.1 billion in 2023.¹

CoreWeave allegedly told investors that it will be spending $24 billion in in capex between 2024 and 2025.⁴

Footnotes

1. CoreWeave’s S-1 filing ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

2. CoreWeave and Dell Technologies Extend Relationship to Deliver AI at Scale | Dell USA ↩

3. LOTA (Local Object Transfer Accelerator) | CoreWeave ↩

4. Microsoft Is a CoreWeave Rival. It’s Also a Big Customer — The Information ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Data centre operator CoreWeave lays groundwork for IPO ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. CoreWeave Partners with IBM to Deliver New AI Supercomputer for IBM Granite Models ↩

7. Nvidia-Backed Cohere to Invest in Mega Data Center in Canada - Bloomberg ↩

8. CoreWeave Secures $7.5 Billion Debt Financing Facility led by Blackstone and Magnetar - Blackstone ↩ ↩²