Glenn's Digital Garden

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 B200 NVL72 racks.2

Software

CoreWeave exposes GPU resources through a Kubernetes interface branded as CoreWeave Kubernetes Services (CKS).

LOTA (Local Object Transfer Accelerator is their in-house object storage cache.3 It is patented by CoreWeave.4

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.56 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 Cloud6
  • Meta61
  • IBM is also using a CoreWeave cluster for training its Granite model.7
  • NVIDIA has also stated that it uses clusters in CoreWeave for internal R&D.5
  • 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.8

Finances

Investors

CoreWeave relies heavily on debt financing (e.g., taking out loans on collateral, like a mortgage) to fund their acquisition of GPUs and datacenters. Most of this debt is tied to specific customer contracts, where CoreWeave borrows money to buy the GPUs to serve a customer, the loan is backed by those GPUs and by the customer contract, and the customer payments pay down the loan so that it is fully repaid by the time the contract ends.9 CoreWeave draws on these loans gradually during buildout instead of borrowing all of the money up front, which is why they are called “delayed draw term loans” (DDTLs).10

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 TypeAmount ($B)MaturityInterest Rate (Estimated)Collateral
Delayed Draw Term Loan 1.02.01Mar 202815%GPUs
Delayed Draw Term Loan 2.03.84May 202911%GPUs
Term Loan Facility1.00Dec 202512%
OEM Financing1.3Feb 2026 – Oct 20279% – 11%GPUs
Revolving Credit Facility0.65Jun 20277.00% or 6.75%

CoreWeave used $1 billion of the money from its IPO to pay off the Term Loan Facility in full.11

Since then, CoreWeave’s debt has more than quadrupled. As of June 30, 2026, they had about $35.1 billion in total debt, up from about $21.4 billion at the end of 2025, and about $7.5 billion of it is due within the next year.12 The following table summarizes the contract-backed loans they have taken out since the S-1 (not all have been drawn):

Loan TypeAmount ($B)MaturityInterest RateCollateral
Delayed Draw Term Loan 2.0 expansion133.05 years after each drawSOFR + 4.25%
Delayed Draw Term Loan 3.0142.6Aug 2030SOFR + 4%GPUs for an OpenAI contract
Delayed Draw Term Loan 4.015168.5Mar 2032SOFR + 2.25%, or about 5.9% fixedGPUs for one customer contract
Delayed Draw Term Loan 5.017183.1Nov 2031GPUs for contracts with two customers
Delayed Draw Term Loan 5.519202.6Sep 2031SOFR + 5.5%GPUs for shorter customer contracts

SOFR is a benchmark interest rate that varies, so the interest rates on these loans change over time. As of September 2026, SOFR was around 4%, putting the above DDTLs at around 8-10%.

CoreWeave has also borrowed by selling bonds to investors that are not backed by specific equipment or contracts.112112 As of June 30, 2026, they had $16.6 billion in bonds outstanding:10

BondAmount ($B)Interest RateMaturity
Bonds2.09.250%2030
Bonds1.89.000%2031
Bonds2.89.750%2031
Bonds1.39.625%2032
Bonds (in euros)2.38.500%2032
Convertible bonds2.61.75%2031
Convertible bonds4.01.75%2032

CoreWeave has also raised $2 billion in equity (e.g., selling shares to investors).22 They closed a $1.1 billion Series C in May 2024.8 They went public in March 2025 and raised about $1.5 billion in their IPO after fees.12 In the first half of 2026, they sold about $3.0 billion more in shares directly to specific investors,12 including $2 billion to NVIDIA at $87.20 per share23 and $1 billion to Jane Street.12

As of April 2026, Magnetar, NVIDIA, and Fidelity each owned more than 5% of CoreWeave.24 As of May 2026, Magnetar reported owning about 14.9% of CoreWeave’s Class A shares (the shares that trade on Nasdaq), counting shares that it has the right to buy at a set price.25 NVIDIA owned about 47.2 million Class A shares as of April 2026,24 which is about 10.7% of the roughly 443 million Class A shares outstanding at the time.25

Revenue

In the first half of 2026, they had $4.653 billion in revenue, compared to $2.194 billion in the first half of 2025.12

As of June 30, 2026, CoreWeave expected to earn about $104 billion in revenue from contracts that customers had already signed, not including more than $25 billion in new contracts signed early in the third quarter of 2026.12 This was up from $66.8 billion at the end of 2025.26

Profitability

As of 2026, CoreWeave is still losing money, and most of its losses now come from interest on its debt. In the second quarter of 2026, CoreWeave lost $49 million from running its business but had $640 million in interest costs, and after other income and taxes, its net loss was $626 million.12 Its interest costs in the same quarter a year earlier were $267 million.12 In the first half of 2026, CoreWeave lost $1.366 billion.12

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 2025.5

Footnotes

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

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

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

  4. patentsgazette.uspto.gov/week09/OG/html/1544-1/US12566563-20260303.html ↩

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

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

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

  8. Nvidia-Backed Cohere to Invest in Mega Data Center in Canada - Bloomberg ↩ ↩2

  9. CoreWeave investor presentation (Form 8-K exhibit, September 2026) ↩

  10. CoreWeave Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 ↩ ↩2

  11. CoreWeave Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2 (May 2025) ↩ ↩2

  12. CoreWeave Reports Strong Second Quarter 2026 Results (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10

  13. CoreWeave Form 8-K, Fifth Amendment to DDTL 2.0 Credit Agreement ↩

  14. CoreWeave Closes $2.6 Billion Secured Debt Financing Facility (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) ↩

  15. CoreWeave Form 8-K, DDTL 4.0 Facility (March 30, 2026) ↩

  16. CoreWeave First Quarter 2026 Results (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) ↩

  17. CoreWeave Form 8-K, DDTL 5.0 Facility (May 15, 2026) ↩

  18. CoreWeave Closes $3.1 Billion Loan Facility (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) ↩

  19. CoreWeave Form 8-K, DDTL 5.5 Facility (August 7, 2026) ↩

  20. CoreWeave Closes $2.6 Billion Loan Facility (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) ↩

  21. CoreWeave Announces Upsize and Pricing of $1,750 million of Senior Notes (Form 8-K) ↩

  22. CoreWeave Secures $2.3 Billion Debt Financing Facility led by Magnetar Capital and Blackstone | CoreWeave Blog | CoreWeave ↩

  23. NVIDIA and CoreWeave Strengthen Collaboration to Accelerate Buildout of AI Factories (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) ↩

  24. CoreWeave 2026 Proxy Statement (Schedule 14A) ↩ ↩2

  25. Magnetar Schedule 13G/A for CoreWeave Class A Common Stock (May 2026) ↩ ↩2

  26. CoreWeave Reports Strong Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) ↩

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