(Reuters) -CoreWeave said on Thursday it was targeting a valuation of up to $26 billion in its U.S. initial public offering, as the Nvidia-backed startup bets on strong demand for generative artificial intelligence.
The AI boom, which has powered super-sized gains for chipmakers such as Nvidia and other big tech firms, has driven a surge in global demand for infrastructure such as data centers and high-powered servers.
The cloud services provider and some of its investors are looking to sell 49 million shares priced between $47 and $55 each to raise as much as $2.7 billion in the offering. Reuters was the first to report the terms on Wednesday.
Earlier this month, CoreWeave signed a five-year contract worth $11.9 billion with generative AI pioneer OpenAI, which gives the ChatGPT maker a stake in the company. CoreWeave will issue shares worth $350 million to OpenAI through a private placement at the time of its IPO.
The offering is expected to be a key test of appetite for AI-focused companies after the launch of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s low-cost model and an analyst report Microsoft had cut back on data-center leases tempered the once red-hot demand.
The U.S. IPO market has struggled to regain momentum after a near three-year slump, with still high interest rates and economic uncertainty keeping many companies on the sidelines.
While there have been a handful of high-profile listings, analysts say a broad revival hinges on larger, buzzy debuts that can reignite confidence and draw more firms to the public markets.
CoreWeave, which provides access to data centers and high-powered chips for AI workloads, mainly supplied by Nvidia, is aiming to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CRWV.”
In its IPO filing earlier in March, CoreWeave reported revenue of $1.92 billion in 2024, compared with $228.9 million a year earlier. Its net loss widened to $863.4 million during the same period, from $593.7 million in 2023.
Roughly two-thirds of its revenue came from Microsoft.
Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are leading a syndicate of Wall Street banks underwriting the offering.
(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
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