Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, attends his company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
CoreWeave‘s stock sank nearly 10% on Monday, falling well below its initial public offering price.
The artificial intelligence cloud provider sold shares at $40 and the stock opened at $39 in its market debut Friday. Shares closed at $40.
CoreWeave’s offering marked the biggest tech IPO since 2021 and the first pure-play AI company to go public. The initial share sale raised $1.5 billion. It was also the largest U.S. IPO since automation software maker UiPath’s $1.57 billion debut in 2021.
CoreWeave’s public offering also served as a major test for an IPO market that has largely dried up since early 2022 as inflation and rising interest rates deterred investors from riskier bets.
Many had hoped that President Donald Trump’s victory would usher in a more favorable setup for IPOs, but new tariffs have triggered economic uncertainty and sapped interest in technology stocks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was down more than 10% year to date. The company, however, joins a growing list of tech-related companies that have recently filed to go public, including Klarna and ticket reseller StubHub.
CoreWeave had initially set its price target on shares at $47 to $55, which would have raised about $2.5 billion at the middle of the range. The company downsized the offering to 37.5 million shares from 49 million.
“There’s a lot of headwinds in the macro,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “And we definitely had to scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was.”
CoreWeave rents out access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units to other large tech and AI companies including Meta, IBM and Cohere. Its most significant customer is Microsoft, which accounted for 62% of the company’s revenue last year. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle are among the company’s most significant competitors.
The company was originally known as Atlantic Crypto when it was founded in 2017. It previously offered infrastructure for mining the ethereum cryptocurrency but snatched up additional graphics processing units and changed its name and focus toward artificial intelligence as digital asset prices fell.
CoreWeave said revenues grew over 737% last year to $1.92 billion in its prospectus filed earlier this month. The company also reported a net loss of $863 million last year.
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting
Leave a Reply