Nvidia-backed CoreWeave picks up $650 million credit line

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.