CoreWeave Inc. signage during the company’s initial public offering at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Friday, March 28, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.
The Trump presidency was set to usher in a rush of money to the markets, spurred by a new era of deregulation and lower taxes that would lead high-valued tech companies off the sidelines and onto public exchanges after a four-year lull in initial public offerings.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in January that he sensed a “more constructive kind of optimism” and that the IPO market is “going to pick up.”
But a little over two months into President Donald Trump’s second White House term, the first test case has been a flop.
After downsizing its IPO late Thursday and pricing below its expected range, CoreWeave was unchanged in its market debut on Friday, closing at $40 and leaving the company with a market cap that’s right around where the company was valued by private investors a year ago.
The debut coincided with a 2.7% drop in the Nasdaq on Friday, a decline that put the tech-heavy index down more than 10% in 2025 and on pace ofr its worst quarterly performance since mid-2022.
Macro concerns are being driven by President Trump’s tariffs on America’s top trading partners and dramatic government cost cuts, moves that are combining to simultaneously raise prices and lift unemployment. The deterioration in consumer sentiment was even worse than anticipated in March as worries over inflation intensified, according to a University of Michigan survey released Friday.
That all created a tough backdrop for CoreWeave to try and crack open the IPO market, particularly given concerns swirling around the company and its valuation. CoreWeave is one of the leading suppliers of Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, for artificial intelligence training and workloads. Demand has been so hot that CoreWeave’s revenue soared more than 700% last year to almost $2 billion.
However, CoreWeave counts on Microsoft for over 60% of sales and recorded a net loss of $863 million last year, due to the hefty costs of GPUs and the expenses associated with leasing and operating data centers. As of Dec. 31, the company had $8 billion in debt.
“It’s a bit disappointing that the price was dropped so significantly at the open,” Joe Medved, a partner at Lerer Hippeau, told CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Friday. “This company has some idiosyncrasies around debt levels and revenue concentration that I think make it a little challenged.”
The other tech-related companies that have filed to go public this year have very different profiles. Hinge Health is a digital health company that uses software to help patients treat pain and injuries, while Klarna is an online lender and StubHub runs a ticket marketplace.
Those are a few of the names that investors are waiting to see hit the market in the near future, hoping for a rebound after tech IPOs almost ground to a halt in late 2021 and have hardly picked up since. According to CB Insights, there are more than 1,200 startups worldwide worth at least $1 billion in the private market. Over 50 of them have been valued at $10 billion or more.
Despite a dearth of IPOs, the highest-profile startups have been able to raise cash from hedge funds, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds, which have all jumped into the late-stage venture capital game. Additionally, megacap tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Nvidia (one of CoreWeave’s key investors) have poured billions of dollars into private AI companies.
“If you’re the founders or CEOs of these companies, you don’t want to deal with the public markets. There’s plenty of demand from these private buyers,” Medved said. “There’s not as much incentive to go out.”
CoreWeave could be fine. The stock could turn up at any time and the broader market could rebound in the second quarter, lifting investor confidence in IPOs. And CoreWeave has the benefit of roughly $1.5 billion in fresh capital from its share sale, even though that’s well below the $2.7 billion that would’ve been raised at the top end of its range.
But the tepid reception stands in stark contrast to how IPOs looked during the record years of 2020 and 2021, when tech companies would raise the range, price above the top end and still see the stock jump in its debut.
CoreWeave CEO and co-founder Michael Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the pricing of the company’s IPO reflected “a lot of headwinds in the macro.”
“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.
Hinge Health signage outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in New York, US, on Thursday, May 21, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of Hinge Health popped in their debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday after the digital physical therapy company raised about $273 million in its IPO.
The stock opened at $39.25, rising 23% from its $32 IPO price. Hinge sold 8.52 million shares in the offering, while the total offering was for 13.7 million shares, with the balance being sold by existing shareholders.
Hinge, founded in 2014, uses software to help patients treat acute musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation from anywhere.
The San Francisco-based company filed its initial prospectus in March and updated the document earlier this month with an expected pricing range of $28 to $32.
Wall Street and the digital health sector have been watching Hinge’s debut closely, as it will shine some light on investors’ appetite for new health-tech solutions.
The broader tech IPO market has been in an extended drought since late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. Within digital health, it’s been almost completely dormant. Hinge is leading the charge, with virtual chronic care company Omada Health filing to go public earlier this month.
“Health care is tough, absolutely, but we’re very different from any of the digital health companies that have come before,” Hinge CEO Daniel Perez told CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Thursday. “Our technology is actually automating the delivery of care itself, and that’s why a lot of investors have been so interested in Hinge Health.”
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Perez and Hinge’s Executive Chairman Gabriel Mecklenburg co-founded the company after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation. Perez broke an arm and a leg after he was hit by a car, and Mecklenburg tore his anterior cruciate ligament during a judo match. Both men went through about 12 months of physical therapy.
At the IPO price, Hinge was worth about $2.6 billion, though that number could be higher on a fully diluted basis. That’s down significantly from a private market valuation of $6.2 billion in October 2021, the last time the company raised outside funding.
Hinge has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Insight Partners, Tiger Global Management, Coatue Management and Atomico.
Ben Blume, a partner at Atomico, said Hinge’s ability to scale has “truly set them apart.” The firm led Hinge’s Series A funding round in 2017.
“Hinge Health has grown into a clear category leader, improving the lives of people who are living with chronic pain,” Blume said in a statement to CNBC. “Their success is a testament to the power of mission-driven innovation.”
Hinge is trading on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Snowflake Inc. signage on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, US, on Jan. 2, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Snowflake shares jumped 12% on Thursday, climbing to their highest level since early last year after the data analytics company reported better-than-expected quarterly results.
Revenue in the fiscal first quarter of 2026 jumped 26% to $1.04 billion from $828.7 million a year earlier, and topped the $1.01 billion average LSEG estimate. It’s the first time the company, which went public in 2020, has recorded more than $1 billion in sales in a quarter.
Adjusted earnings per share of 24 cents exceeded the 21-cent average analyst estimate, according to LSEG. Snowflake reported a net loss of $430 million, a loss of $1.29 a share, widening from a loss of $317 million, or 95 cents a share, a year earlier.
Snowflake has been adding artificial intelligence services into its cloud-based data analytics platform, which the company said in its earning release late Wednesday has helped it reach 11,000 customers.
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Analysts at Cantor highlighted the significance of two new $100 million deals that closed in the quarter after slipping from the prior period, noting that “churn concerns were abated.”
The firm reiterated its buy recommendation on the stock, writing that it has “confidence Snowflake should continue to execute on a beat-and-raise strategy as the year progresses and continue to show leverage in the model.”
With Thursday’s rally, Snowflake shares are up 29% for the year, while the Nasdaq is down close to 2%.
Technology giants OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco are joining forces to help build a sweeping Stargate artificial intelligence campus in the United Arab Emirates.
“AI is the most transformative force of our time,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a release Thursday. “With Stargate UAE, we are building the AI infrastructure to power the country’s bold vision – to empower its people, grow its economy, and shape its future.”
The announcement confirms previous CNBC reporting on the project.
During his Middle East tour last week, President Donald Trump and the U.S. Commerce Department announced a slew of new AI deals, including the UAE Stargate project slated for Abu Dhabi.
The project, in collaboration with Emirati firm G42, will span 10 square miles and include a 5-gigawatt capacity.
As part of the deal, OpenAI and Oracle are slated to manage a 1-gigawatt compute cluster built by G42. The project will include chips from Nvidia, while Cisco Systems will provide connectivity infrastructure.
The companies said an initial 200-megawatt AI cluster should launch next year.
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OpenAI said in a release that the project “reinforces OpenAI’s commitment to strengthening U.S. infrastructure while helping allies gain access to transformative AI responsible and securely.”
The latest project marks the first international iteration of the Trump administration’s multi-billion dollar joint AI infrastructure project announced in January between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. At the time, the companies committed $100 billion to the project and an additional $500 billion over the next four years.
OpenAI said in February that it was weighing data center campuses in 16 states as part of the deal.