Sacra estimates that CoreWeave hit $1.9B in revenue in 2024, up 730% YoY from $229M in 2023, off the rapid acceleration of demand for GPU compute from cloud providers, LLM companies, and every app looking to integrate generative AI features. CoreWeave projects $8B of revenue in 2025.

$10B of its $17B in booked contracts came from Microsoft, which agreed on a multi-year deal for CoreWeave to supply it with GPU compute amid rising demand from Azure cloud customers that Microsoft has not been able to meet.

In 2024, the company reported a net loss of $863M, compared to a net loss of $594M in 2023.

CoreWeave is valued at $23 billion as of 2024, following a secondary share sale with participation from Jane Street, Fidelity Management, and BlackRock.

Based on their 2024 revenue data, CoreWeave has a revenue multiple of 12x, derived from $1.9B in revenue against that $23B valuation.

The company has raised over $12.7B in total equity and debt financing. Notable investors include Nvidia as a strategic partner, while Coatue led their $1.1B Series C round. Additional key investors include Magnetar, Macquarie Capital, and Pure Storage, with the latter also serving as a strategic technology partner.

CoreWeave was founded in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto, an Ethereum mining company that bought Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) both to mine its own crypto and rent out GPU servers to other crypto miners. In early 2019, Atlantic Crypto changed its name to CoreWeave and pivoted to providing GPUs-on-demand for generalized computing purposes rather than focusing on crypto.

Through this period, CoreWeave built infrastructure for delivering that GPU compute across seven global facilities—positioning them well for the flood of demand for GPU compute that arrived in 2022 with the generative AI boom.

Today, CoreWeave is fundamentally a GPU-first cloud platform that lets developers and business access compute remotely the same way they would with Amazon Web Services or Azure.

What differentiates CoreWeave is their far greater availability of the high-end GPUs that are designed for training and running large, complex, AI workloads. With 45,000 GPUS, CoreWeave is the largest private provider of GPUs in North America. In early 2023, CoreWeave was one of the first cloud providers to offer access to the new Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs on its platform.

While AWS and Amazon customers report resources shortages on their cloud platforms, CoreWeave's most favored nation relationship with Nvidia has allowed them to both scale faster to meet demand and offer higher-powered GPUs.

For the AI text adventure game AI Dungeon, which is based on GPT-2, serving 1.6M users of their game drove response times up and cost too much to continue running the product on AWS's Cortex GPU compute platform. Switching to Tesla V100 GPUs delivered via CoreWeave's cloud cut AI Dungeon's response time down by 50%.

CoreWeave, like other cloud providers, operates on a model where it rents out computing resources (such as GPU power) to businesses and developers.

CoreWeave's ~85% gross margins come from the difference between the cost of maintaining these resources (including the initial investment in hardware, ongoing electricity, cooling, maintenance, and support staff costs) and the revenue generated from customers paying to use these resources.

Customers pay CoreWeave for the computing power they use, typically on a per-hour basis. This payment model is attractive to customers because it allows for flexible scaling of resources based on demand, and they only pay for what they use. CoreWeave sets the rental price based on market demand, the specific GPU model (newer models with better performance command higher prices), and the operational costs to ensure a profitable margin.

CoreWeave, like AWS, has an expansion motion in offering different kind of services on top of the basic product of GPU compute. So far, CoreWeave has added on specialized solutions for data storage, networking, CPU compute, each priced on a similar pay-as-you-go basis.

CoreWeave incurs a significant upfront cost when purchasing GPUs and setting up data centers. However, these GPUs have a useful life of several years, during which CoreWeave can continually rent them out. The operational costs include electricity (GPUs are power-hungry), cooling (to prevent overheating), and staffing (for maintenance and customer support).

Improving the efficiency of data center operations (e.g., reducing electricity consumption, negotiating better rates for electricity, or improving cooling systems) can lower operational costs and thus improve margins.

The cost of a GPU for CoreWeave includes the purchase price and the operational costs over its lifespan. The revenue from a GPU is the cumulative amount paid by customers to rent the GPU over time. CoreWeave aims to maximize the utilization of each GPU to ensure that the revenue generated far exceeds the cost.

Margins are generally lowest on CoreWeave's higher-end GPUs. For example, A high-end H100 PCIe card might cost CoreWeave roughly $30,000. That GPU is then rented out at an average of $4.25 per hour. Assuming an 80% utilization rate, it would generate roughly $29,473 in revenue per year ($1/hour * 12 hours/day * 365 days/year)—roughly break-even assuming that they don't hit 100% utilization.

However, cheaper GPUs like the A40, which CoreWeave could have bought in bulk in 2021 before the generative AI boom, could generate much greater margins. At 80% utilization, an A40—which had a sticker price of $4,500 three years ago and is now rented out by CoreWeave at $1.278 per hour—could generate $8,877 in revenue every year.