CoreWeave listed publicly on March 28, 2025, at a valuation near $27 billion1. It cut the raise first, from a planned $2.7 billion down to $1.5 billion. Dealogic reportedly still ranked it the largest AI-related listing by amount raised. Sixteen months later the contract backlog hit $104 billion, with more than $25 billion added in the first weeks of the third quarter4. Between those two points sits the clearest proof yet that renting Nvidia chips at scale became its own asset class, apart from the hyperscalers that still run most of cloud.
CoreWeave's contract backlog hit $104 billion 16 months after it listed at a valuation near $27 billion
CoreWeave's valuation at its March 28, 2025 listing and its contract backlog 16 months later, billions of dollars
The blue column is what CoreWeave was valued at when it listed, and the magenta column is the contract backlog it carried 16 months later.
Sources: Wikipedia [1]; CoreWeave Investor Relations [4]. Chart by Kelly Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| IPO valuation | $27B | March 28, 2025, after cutting the raise to $1.5 billion |
| Contract backlog | $104B | More than $25 billion of it added in the first weeks of the third quarter |
The IPO That Defined a Category
CoreWeave's debut arrived under pressure. The company cut its offering sharply in the days before pricing1. Market watchers read it as real doubt about a GPU-cloud pure play, even while AI spending soared elsewhere. Results settled the argument. Revenue for the second quarter of 2026 reached $2.575 billion, up 112% year over year4. Michael Intrator, co-founder, chairman and chief executive, named the turn. "CoreWeave reached an important inflection point this quarter as our scale began to translate into expanding operating leverage."
He said the harder part on the analyst call. "Our near-term capacity remains effectively sold out," Intrator said6. Then he named the reason he expects that to hold. "The market is very deep. We think that we have an embedded advantage because of our control over the silicon, and we think that we're going to be very successful in that market over time." Control over the silicon is the claim worth testing. CoreWeave buys that silicon from Nvidia, and Nvidia is also its investor1.
Behind the numbers sits a business built on long contracts with a few huge customers. That structure packs opportunity and risk into the same place. OpenAI signed a five-year deal worth close to $12 billion in March 2025, just ahead of the IPO, and took a $350 million stake in a private placement15. Revenue you can see that far out earns a premium multiple. It also ties CoreWeave to the health of a short customer list.
Contracts Built the Balance Sheet, Debt Built the Data Centers
CoreWeave chased scale by buying as well as building. A June 2024 approach to Core Scientific, worth roughly $1 billion, drew a rejection1. The company came back in July 2025 with a $9 billion all-stock offer, nearly ten times larger. Core Scientific's shareholders voted it down that October. Rarely does a target's own investors turn down an AI deal at that premium. CoreWeave pressed on with Meta instead. February 2026 brought an $8.5 billion round secured against the Meta contract. April 2026 brought a $21 billion expansion of the deal.
Financing grew the same way. Magnetar and Blackstone backed a $2.3 billion facility in 20231. Coatue Management led a $1.1 billion round in 2024 at a $19 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley extended a $650 million credit line that October. Nvidia became an investor in January 2026, putting $2 billion in at $87.20 a share. April 2026 brought an upsized $3.5 billion convertible notes offering. Vendor, customer and lender run together here. Nvidia sells CoreWeave the chips, invests in the firm buying them, and watches its own stake rise with CoreWeave's wins.
A Leadership Team Hired From the Hyperscalers
Four founders built CoreWeave: Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, Peter Salanki and Brannin McBee1. They started in 2017 in crypto mining gear, then turned fully to AI compute. Scaling that into a public company took hires from the very firms CoreWeave now fights for customers. Nitin Agrawal joined as chief financial officer in 2024 from Google. Sachin Jain arrived as chief operating officer in August 2024 from Oracle's AI division, and Chen Goldberg joined the same month as senior vice president of engineering, also from Google.
Read the pattern as strategy. A founder-led company moved toward discipline fast enough to satisfy public markets. Agrawal knows from Google how hyperscalers spend. Jain brings from Oracle the enterprise sales work a crypto pivot rarely teaches.
Nebius and Nscale Run the Same Model
A smaller rival runs it at earlier scale. Nebius, led by chief executive Arkady Volozh, posted 2025 revenue of $529.8 million against a net loss of $446.7 million2. Nvidia put $2 billion into Nebius on March 11, 2026, matching its January stake in CoreWeave. Read the two stakes together. The chipmaker holds equity across several neoclouds, which spreads its bet on any one of them. Nebius moved past raw rental in February 2026, buying the search-API firm Tavily for roughly $400 million and announcing an AI data center in Birmingham, Alabama.
Nscale came in from a different angle, landing Anthropic on a roughly $45 billion compute deal in August 20263. It covers close to 460 megawatts at a West Virginia data center due to run in late 2027, on Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. Anthropic spreads its buying across Nscale, Google's TPUs, AWS Trainium and AMD GPUs at once. Read that as a choice. It refuses to lean on one supplier the way CoreWeave's OpenAI-heavy backlog once did.
The Rest of the Class
Crusoe, Lambda, Together AI and Fluidstack fill out a class built on one shared bet. GPU capacity, sold on long contract to labs and firms priced out of building their own data centers, is a lasting business whichever model wins. Each runs a variation: stranded energy sites, purpose-built campuses, or software on rented chips. Disclosure at CoreWeave's level of detail stays rare among the smaller players.
Kerrisdale Capital read the same filings and reached the opposite conclusion. The activist short seller published its case against CoreWeave on Sept. 15, 2025, nearly six months after the IPO, pairing a fair-value target of $10 a share with a forecast that the company would burn $19 billion of cash before the year closed7. "Strip away the noise, and CoreWeave remains an undifferentiated, heavily levered GPU rental scheme stitched together by timing and financial engineering, not lasting innovation," the firm wrote. Returns under the cost of capital, in Kerrisdale's read, turn Intrator's claimed advantage over the silicon into a line the balance sheet contradicts.
By the numbers
- CoreWeave's backlog reached $104 billion, with more than $25 billion added early in the third quarter4.
- March 28, 2025 marked CoreWeave's IPO debut at a $27 billion valuation1.
- Revenue of $2.575 billion arrived in the second quarter of 2026, up 112% year over year4.
- Five years: the term of OpenAI's roughly $12 billion CoreWeave contract, signed March 202515.
- A $9 billion all-stock offer for Core Scientific went to a vote in July 2025 and lost in October1.
- April 2026 brought a $21 billion expansion of CoreWeave's Meta infrastructure partnership1.
- Nebius posted full-year 2025 revenue of $529.8 million2.
- Anthropic's Nscale agreement, signed August 2026, runs roughly $45 billion across 460 megawatts3.
What to watch
CoreWeave's third-quarter results test one thing4. Does the $25 billion in fresh backlog convert into recognized revenue at the pace prior quarters set, or does contract timing lag the headline? Nebius deserves a close read for deal specifics beyond Tavily and the Nvidia stake2. Watch whether its hyperscaler ties widen the way CoreWeave's did after listing. Nscale's West Virginia site, still more than a year out, gives an early read on whether a newer entrant can hold a build schedule at the pace its Anthropic contract demands3.
Sources
- Wikipedia contributors, "CoreWeave," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 1, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoreWeave
- Wikipedia contributors, "Nebius Group," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 1, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebius_Group
- Wikipedia contributors, "Anthropic," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 1, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic
- CoreWeave, "CoreWeave Reports Strong Second Quarter 2026 Results," CoreWeave Investor Relations, Aug. 11, 2026, https://investors.coreweave.com/news/news-details/2026/CoreWeave-Reports-Strong-Second-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx
- Muhammad Zulhusni, "CoreWeave secures $11.9 billion OpenAI contract as IPO nears," CloudTech, March 13, 2025, https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/coreweave-secures-usd-11-billion-openai-contract-as-ipo-nears/
- Fortune, "CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator cites 'sold out' capacity as revenue more than doubles and backlog swells to $104 billion," Fortune, Aug. 11, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/08/11/coreweave-ceo-michael-intrator-cites-sold-out-capacity-as-revenue-more-than-doubles-and-backlog-swells-to-104-billion/
- HFA Staff, "CoreWeave Inc (CRWV): Artificial Returns - Kerrisdale Capital," Hedge Fund Alpha, Sept. 15, 2025, https://hedgefundalpha.com/stock-analysis/coreweave-artificial-returns-kerrisdale/