This is Coreweave, which has undergone an incredible metamorphosis from crypto-mining operation to a future leader in AI infrastructure. Barring its tumultuous IPO, the company has been on a major stock roller coaster. Coreweave’s stock started trading at a $40 valuation back in March. It had ever seen, as it skyrocketed to more than $150 but has since come down to around $90. Coreweave’s IPO figured to be the biggest of its kind this year, at least before interest rates soared. Its performance in the public market has not lived up to the promise of what investors and analysts expected.
Michael Intrator, co-founder and CEO of Coreweave, is coming off defense after the company’s meteoric rise and subsequent plummet in stock value. One of the things that Coreweave is doing, he reiterated, is building a different model of business for cloud computing. He thinks it will take the market a while to realize just how significant this change is.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, as Intrator said…people are myopic most of the time. He pointed out that when you’re bringing in new models and shaking up the way business has always been done, it sometimes just takes longer. When you bring in a new model, or a new way of doing business, you’re challenging that static environment. That’s going to be a difficult adjustment for some folks.”
Coreweave’s meteoric rise to become one of the biggest tech companies in North America was accelerated by a spree of recent acquisitions. In March, the company bought Weights and Balances, a creative AI developer platform. Shortly thereafter they acquired OpenPipe, a pioneer in building and deploying AI agents using reinforcement learning. In mid-October, we announced our exciting acquisition of GPU cloud provider CoreWeave. They’re acquiring Marimo, which produces open source development notebooks, as well as another AI-focused company called Monolith.
For Coreweave’s experience, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. A plan to acquire Core Scientific, one of GPTC’s business partners, recently collapsed under the weight of incredulity from the proposed target’s shareholders. Because of its massive debt burden, the company is now facing even deeper uncertainty. This has caused a great deal of apprehension amongst investors about the long-term sustainability of this situation.
Even with these challenges in the way, Coreweave isn’t hitting the brakes. The company has announced an expansion of its cloud partnership with OpenAI and is actively exploring opportunities within the federal market. We are committed to providing federal cloud infrastructure solutions to U.S. government agencies and the defense industrial base,” said Intrator.
Meanwhile, Coreweave’s stock has been wildly erratic. Consequently, some analysts these days refer to it as a “meme stock,” pointing to how irrational its behavior has become in the marketplace. Coreweave has garnered a mix of criticism and praise for its outsized influence over the nascent, booming AI infrastructure sector. Even so, the business continues to believe in its strategic long game.
