Artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave is set to make its Nasdaq debut on Friday. The company priced shares at $40 in its initial public offering on Thursday, raising $1.5 billion.

As a supplier to OpenAI, CoreWeave is among the beneficiaries of the rise of generative AI software such as the San Francisco AI startup’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022.

Microsoft provided cloud services to OpenAI but quickly called in CoreWeave, which rents out access to its hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units, to provide additional capacity. In 2024, 62% of CoreWeave’s $1.92 billion in revenue came from Microsoft.

But Microsoft is also a competitor, as are Amazon, Google and Oracle.

Few technology companies have joined stock exchanges since late 2021, when investors became more cautious about inflation, leading central banks to raise interest rates. That in turn made unprofitable companies less attractive.

There were been just 13 venture-backed technology IPOs in 2022, 2023 and 2024, compared with 77 in 2021, according to data from Jay Ritter, an emeritus professor of finance at the University of Florida.

CoreWeave reported a $863 million net loss in 2024, but it was in growth mode, with revenue growing 737% year over year. It had raised almost $13 billion in debt as of Dec. 31, with much of that allocated for GPUs that go inside the company’s leased data centers in the U.S. and abroad.

The technology industry can now boast the largest U.S. IPO since automation software maker UiPath‘s $1.57 billion New York Stock Exchange debut in 2021. Still, CoreWeave downsized its offering to 37.5 million shares from 49 million and priced below the initial range of $47 to $55 each.

Since CoreWeave filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 3, digital physical therapy company Hinge Health and Swedish online lender Klarna have done the same. Discord, which runs popular chat software, has hired banks for an IPO, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

CoreWeave’s arrival on Nasdaq might inspire other AI companies to go public, too. An “AI parade” might be on the way, Mark Klein, CEO of SuRo Capital, which invests in private companies, told CNBC earlier.

Data analytics company Databricks, which partly generates revenue by running AI models on behalf of clients, announced a funding round at a $62 billion valuation in December. OpenAI, for its part, was in talks to raise money at a $340 billion valuation as of January.

CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and is based in Livingston, New Jersey, with 881 employees at the end of 2024. Before CoreWeave’s IPO, Michael Intrator, the company’s co-founder and CEO, controlled 38% of its voting power, while Nvidia held 1%. Other investors include Fidelity and Magnetar.

WATCH: The slowdown of the AI buzzword momentum trade will hurt CoreWeave, says NYU’s Aswath Damodaran

CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator said Friday that the company’s IPO pricing, which came in below expectations, has to be placed in the larger context of the macroenvironment.

“There’s a lot of headwinds in the macro,” Intrator said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “And we definitely had to scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was.”

The company, which provides access to Nvidia graphics processing units for artificial intelligence training and workloads, priced its IPO at $40 a share, below the initial $47 to $55 per share filing. The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol “CRWV.”

The lower price provided enough of a discount to the replacement value that investors could feel comfortable buying, sources familiar with the offering told CNBC’s Leslie Picker. Replacement value is the value of the company’s assets at the present time.

About 10-15 long-only and strategic investors made up the majority of the backing group, the sources said.

“We believe that as the public markets get to know us, get to know how we execute, get to know how we build our infrastructure, get to know how we build our client relationships and the incredible capacity of our solutions, the company will be very successful,” Intrator said.

Nvidia is anchoring the deal with a $250 million order, CNBC reported Thursday.

CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion at the $40 per share price, giving it a non-diluted valuation of around $19 billion.

Intrator said the company will use the money to pay down debt and for expansion.

The company held nearly $8 billion in debt at the end of 2024.

CoreWeave was also bolstered by the recent market action triggered by DeepSeek, which pushed the company to “build bigger” and “build faster,” Intrator said.

“One of the things that’s made us incredibly effective is we take a really long-term view of where this space is going,” he said.

“Our customers are telling us, universally, to continue to build – we cannot keep up with the scale.”

Intrator also addressed administrative issues with a loan last year in which the company faced technical defaults.

The company started to use money from the $7.6 billion loan for scaling in Europe, The Financial Times reported.

Intrator said the company self-reported the “misstep” in its S-1 and quickly addressed it with the lenders.

“Those lenders proceeded to go ahead and continue to lend us hundreds of millions of dollars after all of these issues,” he said.

Taiwan investigators on Friday alleged that Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC) illegally recruited high-technology talent.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MIJB) said in a statement that SMIC had used a Samoa-based entity as cover to set up a subsidiary on the island “under the guise of foreign investment” and has been “actively recruiting” talent from Taiwan.

CNBC was unable to independently verify the claims and SMIC was not immediately available for comment.

The ministry said Taiwan began investigating the issue in December 2024. Eleven Chinese enterprises suspected of paoching talent were investigated, it said, with agents conducting searches at 34 locations and questioning 90 individuals.

SMIC is China’s biggest semiconductor manufacturing firm. It was thrust into the spotlight in 2023 when it was revealed to be the maker of the 7 nanometer chip in Huawei’s smartphone at the time. A few years prior, SMIC was put on a U.S. government export blacklist.

China has been trying to ramp up its chipmaking capabilities via SMIC, but the company remains behind competitors like TSMC in Taiwan. Chip export restrictions imposed by the U.S. also mean SMIC is unable to access the latest chipmaking tools from critical suppliers like ASML that could allow it to catch up.

Taiwan is a hotbed of talent in the semiconductor industry as it is home to TSMC, the world’s biggest and most advanced chipmaker. The U.S. has sought to tap into this talent, and bring more chipmaking capabilities to its shores, by convincing TSMC to build more manufacturing capacity in the country.

Taiwan’s MJIB said it set up a special task force at the end of 2020 to investigate allegations of “illegal poaching” of talent.

“Chinese enterprises often disguise their identities through various means, including setting up operations under the guise of Taiwanese, overseas Chinese, or foreign-invested companies, while in reality being backed by Chinese capital, establishing unauthorized business locations in Taiwan without government approval, and using employment agencies to falsely assign employees to Taiwanese firm,” the ministry said.