A cloud provider specializing in artificial intelligence, CoreWeave continues to raise funds. It completes a Series C round for funding of $1.1 billion, almost tripling its valuation to $19 billion compared to December, when it raised $642 million in funds. This followed the $2.3 billion secured in August 2023 through debt financing from Magnetar, Blackstone, BlackRock and others.
Led by Coatue, this new funding round brought together Magnetar, as well as Altimeter Capital, Fidelity and Lykos. These funds “will be used to support rapid growth across all areas of the business and CoreWeave’s expansion into new geographies,” declares the start-up.
Advertisement
A major partner: nVIDIA
CoreWeave sells virtual machines based on GPUs from Nvidia in the form of cloud sessions that are typically used by enterprise clients to train AI models. Considered a privileged partner of Nvidia since its beginnings, CoreWeave has split a ticket during the presentation of Blackwell GPUs last March, announcing that it was among the first to offer instances powered by Blackwell.
“The GB200 superchip will enable companies to develop generative AI on LLMs with billions of parameters, at up to 25 times lower cost and power consumption than its predecessor”the start-up then indicated.
A presence in 14 data centers to meet demand
CoreWeave's solutions are primarily aimed at AI, cinematic visual effects rendering, and real-time streaming. CoreWeave also indicates that it operates a number of data centers covering all regions of the United States to “meet explosive demand”, in the words of Michael Intrator, its co-founder and CEO. Thus, over the year 2023, CoreWeave increased its presence in its data centers from three to 14 and quadrupled its workforce.
A booming market
CoreWeave is not the only company to enter this market. Artificial intelligence has driven a number of start-ups to develop virtual infrastructure solutions for training AI models. Its closest competitor is Lambda Labs, a California company. At the beginning of April, the company also obtained a $500 million loan to finance the expansion of its accelerator-as-a-service offering. An envelope allocated to the acquisition of Nvidia GPUs which cost between $30,000 and $40,000 each.
Advertisement
In France, FlexAI offers this type of solution to developers who do not have access to large quantities of calculation. Goal: simplify the training process to make it as fast as opening a cloud instance. The French start-up even raised funds recently to ensure its development even though it has not yet celebrated its first candle. Its positioning differs somewhat from that of CoreWeave because it offers to deploy the models on heterogeneous architectures, which can include Intel or AMD GPUs as well as Gaudi or Cerebras accelerators.
Do you want to stay up to date on the latest news in the artificial intelligence sector? Register for free to the IA Insider newsletter.
Selected for you