Crypto miner turned AI provider CoreWeave adds billions in market cap

Shares of AI cloud computing company CoreWeave (CRWV) surged on May 16 after chip giant Nvidia revealed a large ownership stake, signaling growing corporate and institutional interest in the newly public company.

CRWV stock climbed as much as 26.3% in New York trading, pushing its market capitalization above $38 billion. Trading volumes were more than double the daily average, according to Yahoo Finance data.

The stock was last seen trading around $81, up 23% on the day.

CoreWeave’s rally was sparked by regulatory filings from Nvidia showing that the company owned $900 million of CRWV stock at the end of the first quarter. The value of the holdings has more than doubled since March 31, assuming Nvidia hasn’t sold any shares since then.

As CNBC reported, Nvidia’s ownership stake at the time of CoreWeave’s initial public offering (IPO) was 17.9 million shares.

CoreWeave’s stock has gained more than 100% from its IPO price of $40 in late March. It has vastly outperformed the Nasdaq Composite Index and broader US stock market over that period.

The Nvidia revelations overshadowed CoreWeave’s fiscal first-quarter earnings report, which showed a 420% surge in revenue but also a 487% spike in operating expenses. The company’s net loss widened by 143% compared to a year earlier. Its stock declined shortly after the financials were released on May 14.

CoreWeave’s origin story began in 2017 as an Ethereum mining operation called Atlantic Crypto. The company began transitioning away from digital assets the following year after the onset of the bear market.

By 2019, it had rebranded to CoreWeave and began leveraging its GPU infrastructure to provide cloud computing services. The company then rode out the AI boom and its unique relationship with Nvidia to secure a massive IPO launch. 

CoreWeave has landed other major investors, with Cointelegraph reporting in March that OpenAI reached an $11.9 billion deal with the company to supply AI infrastructure for the ChatGPT developer’s massive data needs. 

CoreWeave is operating in a much broader cloud computing industry, which is forecast to become a $2 trillion behemoth by 2030 as AI applications gain mainstream adoption, according to Goldman Sachs. 

Another estimate by Fortune Business Insights suggests that the global cloud AI market alone could approach $600 billion by 2032, marking a compound annual growth rate of 28.5%.

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