Clouds and Data Centres

On 27 March 2025 CoreWeave priced its initial public offering at $40 a share. It had hoped for $47–55. It sold 37.5 million shares and raised about $1.5 billion, at a valuation reported at about $19 billion on basic shares and $23 billion fully diluted, with Nvidia reportedly anchoring the deal with an order of about $250 million (reported). The company began trading on Nasdaq the next day as the first large AI-infrastructure listing of the cycle.

The prospectus explained the hesitation. CoreWeave, founded in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto, an Ethereum-mining operation run by three former commodity traders, had grown revenue from about $229 million in 2023 to about $1.92 billion in 2024 and lost about $863 million doing it. About 62% of its 2024 revenue came from one customer, Microsoft, and much of that capacity served OpenAI, which Microsoft was obliged to supply under their partnership (reported). On 6 March 2025, three days after the public filing, the Financial Times had reported that Microsoft had walked away from some of its commitments, which CoreWeave denied. Investors were being asked to buy a cloud whose credit was largely another company's, financed with debt secured on chips that lose value every year.

The listing went better than its pricing. The shares reached an intraday high of about $187 on 20 June 2025, then fell back to roughly $60–80 by October 2026 after a stock-and-bond sell-off (market data, reported). Between those points lies the business model of AI's second layer: turning chips into rentable capacity, and deciding who carries the risk while the capacity waits to be paid for.