Nvidia-backed CoreWeave gets $650 million credit line from top Wall Street banks
In this photo illustration, a Core Weave logo is displayed on a smartphone with stock market percentages on the background.
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CoreWeave, an Nvidia-backed artificial intelligence startup that rents out chips to other companies, announced Friday that it has a new $650 million credit line to expand its business and data center portfolio.
The cloud infrastructure company said it’s raised $12.7 billion from equity and debt investors in the past 18 months, including a $1.1 billion round in May at a $19 billion valuation.
By the end of 2024, CoreWeave plans to have 28 data centers across the U.S. and abroad — including locations in Austin, Texas, Chicago, Las Vegas and London — and it plans to build another 10 data centers in 2025. In the past, CoreWeave has supplied Microsoft and French AI startup Mistral with graphics processing units, or GPUs.
As of last year, CoreWeave reportedly had $2 billion in revenue under contract lined up for 2024.
AI models are notoriously expensive to build and train, requiring thousands of specialized chips that, to date, have largely come from Nvidia. Most, if not all, tech companies that are power players in AI spend between hundreds of thousands and billions of dollars on Nvidia chips to make their models work. And in addition to developing the chips, Nvidia has taken stakes in emerging AI companies like CoreWeave, partly as a way to make sure its technology gets widely deployed.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley led the financing CoreWeave announced Friday, with participation from Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Jefferies, Mizuho, MUFG and Wells Fargo.
“This credit facility provides additional liquidity to accelerate our growth strategy and capitalize on new opportunities in the rapidly evolving AI space,” Mike Intrator, CoreWeave’s co-founder and CEO, said in a press release.
CoreWeave’s new credit line is part of a broader trend, as banks are positioning themselves for a slice of the AI gold rush ahead of a number of potential IPOs in the space. The generative AI market is poised to top $1 trillion in revenue by 2032, according to one estimate.
Last week, OpenAI received a $4 billion revolving line of credit, bringing its total liquidity to more than $10 billion. The news came just after OpenAI closed its latest funding round at a $157 billion valuation.
Many of the same banks contributed to OpenAI’s credit line. The startup has an option to increase it by an additional $2 billion.
CoreWeave declined to provide details about the interest rate it’s paying or the timeframe for the credit facility.
Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.
WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software
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