In another chess move with Microsoft, OpenAI is pouring $12B into CoreWeave
In a chess movement on a grandmaster, OpenAi has a Five -year agreement of $ 11.9 billion With the GPU-heavy cloud service provider Coreweave, according to Reuters, who quotes people close to the deal.
The deal means that OpenAi receives $ 350 million in equity in Coreweave, the sources told Reuters. The private placement would be separate from the planned IPO from CoreWeave.
CoreWeave submitted last week to become a public company, but it has not yet priced or planned his debut.
It is a victory for both companies. One reason why this agreement is so striking (in addition to the billions involved) is that the largest customer of CoreWeave was before this deal Microsoft. In 2024, Microsoft was in fact accounting for 62% of CoreWeave’s income, which grew to a stunning $ 1.9 billion – almost an eight -fold increase of only $ 228.9 million in 2023.
Supported by Nvidia, which owns a 6% interest, has an AI-specific cloud service with a network of 32 data centers that, according to the company, from the end of 2024 more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs served. Since then, CoreWeave has added more GPUs, including the latest product from Nvidia, Blackwell, which supports AI reasoning, the company said.
Such a dependence on one customer is usually worrying for IPO investors and could have added “her” as they say, the hope of CoreWeave to collect $ 4 billion or more in his IPO. Landing OpenAi as a direct customer in a multi-billion dollar deal should help CoreWeave investors.
Microsoft and OpenAi’s relationship
What makes this step equally interesting is that it is a different step in the deteriorating, Frenemies relationship between Microsoft and OpenAi.
It is as if Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAi, saw the use of Microsoft from CoreWeave and said, “Hold my beer.”
OpenAi will not only have access to the same cloud, but it will also have a ownership of ownership in the company that it is performing.
Microsoft is of course a large Backer from OpenAi in a deal that gives Microsoft the right to collect part of the income from OpenAi. But tensions between two companies have been rising for years, because the fortune of OpenAi has risen. OpenAi competes with Microsoft for Enterprise customers and reportedly even works on rolling out expensive AI agents.
In January, as part of the enormous Stargate AI infrastructure agreement with Softbank, Oracle and others, Microsoft stopped being on the only cloud provider of OpenAi. OpenAi needs more areas of calculation. Last week Altman complained that OpenAi is ‘from GPUs’.
For his part, Microsoft is working on the AI ”reasoning models” similar to OpenAi’s O1 and O3-Mini. It develops a whole family from his own models called Mai who are competitive with OpenAi. It also hired Altman’s rival, Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI.
But CoreWeave is a surprising chess piece.
CoreWeave started his life as a crypto -mining operation, founded by former Hedgefonds, boys, said it. The three co-founders already have $ 488 million in shares of cashed in more than $ 150 million each. CoreWeave also has a stunning $ 7.9 billion in debts on the books.
If the IPO generates the billions of new capital, they hope it will do, the company says it will at least use it to pay the debt.
Although these founders once literally tried to use GPUs to mint money, they apparently apparently achieve it.
CoreWeave and OpenAi did not respond to our request for comments.
