Shares of CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider, started trading Friday following a much-anticipated IPO that is being seen as a litmus test for other AI companies hoping to go public.
Originally founded as a crypto mining company, CoreWeave pivoted to renting out its Nvidia graphic processing units to companies desperate to train AI. The New Jersey-based company is the first tech listing this year, but its debut does not come without controversy. While revenue is up more than 700% year over year, only two customers account for 77% of that figure, and the company has warned of “material weaknesses,” including its capacity for internal financial reporting.
The company’s shares opened at $39, and reached $41.79 earlier today after being priced at $40 in the IPO. The company—founded by Michael Intrator, Brannin McBee, and Brian Venturo—now has a market cap of around $19.44 billion. The stock closed at just under $40.
I sat down with Intrator, the company’s CEO, to hear more about what differentiates their business, and why they decided to go public.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity
Fortune: To be an AI company based in New Jersey is like being East Coast rap.
Michael Intrator: Funny, because that’s sort of how we feel.
So how are you feeling about the IPO?
I am unbelievably excited about what we’ve accomplished and it’s just so incredible for the company. It’s incredible for our ability to continue to execute and scale our business. I’m really, really excited about where we are.
What differentiates you in the market?
There are three things that we do as a company. The first piece is that we built a beautiful technical solution to how to run parallelized computing in the cloud. It’s a software solution that is specifically specialized to make the compute performant available, scalable, flexible, all the things that you need to build and train and serve artificial intelligence use cases. When the hyperscalers built a function for CPU computing, they built a minivan—a configuration of compute that was really good at everything, but not great at anything, and that was exactly what you needed to build a cloud for [a] CPU-based computer, sequential based. What we did is we stepped back and said, “How do you architect a beautiful technical solution to this new problem associated with how you run cloud computing for parallelized workloads?” We have a better software solution to optimize the infrastructure.
The second one is, you need to understand the power markets, the data, to ultimately make the compute available and useful for your clients. And we’re able to do that at massive scale.
And the third area of the business is that we need to be able to use the financial markets to access the size and scale of capital that allows you to build at a scale that lets you be relevant in this revolution.
What made you decide to tap the capital markets right now?
Going public was a means to an end for us. We are focused on the debt markets, because the debt markets are how we will finance and build the business and scale it. By becoming public, by continuing to scale the business, we will be able to more effectively tap the debt markets, which will drive down the cost structure associated with building at this magnitude. And so ultimately, the company will become a rated entity, and we’ll be able to borrow at a much tighter spread to the other folks that we’re competing with in the market. The objective was to get to the market, to build a syndicate of buyers that are very sticky and believe in the mission that we are building, that are going to be long-term shareholders that will give us an opportunity to drive value over the next 20 years.
You scaled back the size of the offer.
When you take into account the broader market headwinds, the AI headwinds around that specific trade, it just made sense to shrink the size of the offering and to adjust the price to account for the current risk profile on the market. And ultimately, today is the best day to go public, because it puts us on the path towards what we need to accomplish as a business. Yeah, so, a little bigger, a little smaller, a little higher, a little lower. That’s not going to matter. What’s going to matter is, how do we execute on our business? How do we scale our business? How do we build our client base? How do we diversify our clients, all of those things that are just so important and so much easier when you are a public company than a private company.
What’s your reaction to the media coverage around the IPO? You’re not too concentrated on one client?
Well, they say that we had 60% of revenue from Microsoft, and then we signed a contract with OpenAI for just under $12 billion and now we’re less than 50%. All the big players that need this type of infrastructure, that understand the quality of the infrastructure we deliver and the skill and performance that they will be able to achieve with it, those are our customers. And then we’ll have other customers like JPMorgan and IBM and, you know, Jane Street Training that use the infrastructure in a different way to solve for a very specific problem. They will be wonderful clients too, but they’re not going to be building a three gigawatt facility. There’s just not that many people that need that. So there will be concentration when you win one of those mind-bendingly large deals, and you’re going to win a lot of other deals in the enterprise space that are really, really interesting.
So what is the market getting wrong?
I think that the market needs to understand over time that there will be concentration for everyone that’s serving us.
Alibaba’s chairman said that he thinks there could be a data center bubble. And DeepSeek planted the idea we may not need all this compute.
I think there’s a divergence between what the capital markets and what the media is thinking, and what I am feeling down in the trenches. What I am feeling—and then I’ll tell you what I think the media saying—is relentless demand. We need more compute. We need larger compute. We have many, many clients in line to get into our infrastructure, and we are throttled by our ability to bring it up online as we build up the data center and infrastructure to deliver it. I think that’s true for a lot of other really important clients out there, like Meta.
Have you become too emblematic of broader trends? Do you feel that too much is being thrust on you in terms of what this IPO represents, what you represent?
I really don’t think about it that way. I think about it as this idea is important for our company to continue to execute on our strategy, and one of the things that we do really well is execute, so I don’t get too distracted by the noise. I know what my clients want. I know the type of infrastructure they need. I know the type of scale that they’re requesting, and I build for them and we are client-led.
What’s your message for those who wonder about your boldness in coming to market now?
I think that the boldness of coming to this market amid the turmoil is because of a fundamental belief that, over time, I will be able to generate enormous value for my investors. I don’t really care where it is today or tomorrow or the day after, but I believe fundamentally, the business model that we have, the software solutions that we have, the capacity to build and deliver this and the demand we see in front of us will lead to enormous value to our clients over time.
Given your history with crypto mining, any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I don’t. I don’t spend too much time on that. My business is really focused on this, and I got my hands full, as I’m sure you can imagine.
The stock opened $1 below the IPO price. Do you feel like there’s some fatigue setting in?
I think there’s a lot of people who are talking their book and causing an echo chamber. Look at the end of the day, the overriding lens that I use here is that in entering the public markets, I have prepared this company to be able to continue to build and execute, and when you can do that, you can drive enormous shareholder value to your investors. That’s what we’re going to do every day.
