CoreWeave has generated explosive gains since its market debut two months ago.
CoreWeave (CRWV -17.20%), a provider of dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) cloud infrastructure services, launched its initial public offering (IPO) on March 28 at $40 a share. Its stock barely budged after the IPO, but it warmed up in April, heated up even more throughout May, and now trades at about $156 per share. During that same period, the S&P 500 only rose 7% as the Nasdaq Composite advanced 12%.
Let’s see why CoreWeave’s stock more than quadrupled in just over two months — and if it’s still worth chasing today.
What does CoreWeave do?
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 as a cryptocurrency miner that purchased large quantities of GPUs to mine Ethereum. But after the cryptocurrency crash of 2018, it abandoned the crypto mining market and leveraged its large inventory of GPUs to build a cloud infrastructure platform for processing AI tasks.
In 2022, it spent about $100 million to install Nvidia’s (NVDA -1.44%) high-end H100 GPUs in its data centers. That massive investment paid off as the explosive growth of the AI market — and the high costs of purchasing Nvidia’s GPUs — prompted more companies to rent CoreWeave’s cloud-based GPUs to power their latest AI applications. CoreWeave also used its GPUs as collateral to secure billions of dollars in additional financing.
CoreWeave’s dedicated AI cloud infrastructure services differentiate it from bigger and more broadly diversified public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft (MSFT 0.69%) Azure. It claims that its dedicated approach makes it about 35 times faster and 80% cheaper than traditional cloud platforms for AI tasks. That disruptive approach attracted the attention of some big investors like Nvidia, Cisco Systems, and PureStorage, which paved the way for its market debut this year.
How fast is CoreWeave growing?
CoreWeave now operates 33 data centers across the U.S. and Europe, up from 15 centers in 2024, 14 centers in 2023, and just three centers in 2022. Its revenue skyrocketed from $16 million in 2022 to $229 million in 2023, then surged again to $1.92 billion in 2024. In the first quarter of 2025, its revenue surged a whopping 420% year over year to $982 million. It had a revenue backlog of $25.9 billion, including a new $11.2 billion contract with OpenAI.
However, CoreWeave’s net loss widened from $31 million in 2022 to $594 million in 2023, then widened again to $863 million in 2024. Its operating expenses are soaring as it buys and leases more data centers, purchases more data center GPUs for Nvidia, and absorbs its higher energy fees. Its net loss more than doubled year over year to $315 million in the first quarter of 2025.
