Shares of Coreweave (CRWV) rose 9% during pre-market trading on Monday after AI powerhouse Nvidia (NVDA) invested another $2 billion in an effort to accelerate the company’s buildout of next-generation data centers built specifically for AI workloads.
The funding, which came through the purchase of CoreWeave’s Class A stock at $87.20 per share, will help the company scale up to more than 5 gigawatts of AI-dedicated data centers, or “AI factories,” by the end of the decade.
CRWV closed at $92.98 on Friday. With the early gain, the stock is trading just above $101. NVDA shares are lower by 0.5% pre-market.
Nvidia’s backing provides more than capital. The deal also extends a years-long collaboration that aligns both firms on hardware, software and data center strategy.
The companies will also test CoreWeave’s software stack, including its resource scheduling platform Mission Control, with an eye toward integrating it into Nvidia’s broader ecosystem.
“CoreWeave’s deep AI factory expertise, platform software, and unmatched execution velocity are recognized across the industry,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia said in a statement.
Nvidia last September entered into a $6.3 billion agreement with CoreWeave to purchase unsold computing capacity through 2032.
CoreWeave started as a bitcoin mining company in 2017 under the name Atlantic Crypto, but quickly pivoted to cloud computing and AI after the crypto crash in 2018.