Shares in CoreWeave rose strongly on Monday after the world’s largest company, NVIDIA, announced a US$2 billion investment in the data centre operator as part of an expansion of their relationship.
The CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) price closed $5.33 (5.73%) higher at US$98.31, capitalising the company at $48.99 billion (A$70.5 billion) following the announcement.
NVIDIA and CoreWeave said they would expand their long-standing complementary relationship to enable CoreWeave to accelerate the buildout of more than 5 gigawatts (GW) of artificial intelligence (AI) factories by 2030.
NVIDIA has also invested $2 billion in CoreWeave Class A common stock at $87.20 per share, which they said reflected NVIDIA’s confidence in CoreWeave’s business, team and growth strategy as a cloud platform built on NVIDIA infrastructure.
“AI is entering its next frontier and driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a news release.
“CoreWeave’s deep AI factory expertise, platform software and unmatched execution velocity are recognised across the industry. Together, we’re racing to meet extraordinary demand for NVIDIA AI factories — the foundation of the AI industrial revolution.”
NVIDIA was CoreWeave's third-largest shareholder with a 6.3% stake, or 24.3 million shares, in the company, according to a Reuters news story.
A gigawatt is becoming a common metric for describing AI data centre capacity, with 5 GW equivalent to the annual power consumption of 4 million U.S. households, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration.
“Demand for AI continues to grow exponentially and the need for compute has never been greater,” the companies said.
To help meet this demand, they plan to build AI factories operated by CoreWeave using NVIDIA’s computing platform technology and leverage NVIDIA’s financial strength to accelerate CoreWeave’s procurement of land, power and shell for factories.
They also intend to test and validate CoreWeave’s AI-native software and reference architecture and deploy multiple generations of NVIDIA infrastructure across CoreWeave’s platform.
