CoreWeave completes Nasdaq IPO, the largest US tech IPO since 2021

CoreWeave, a cloud-computing provider that rents Nvidia GPU capacity to AI labs and companies, listed on Nasdaq under the ticker CRWV, pricing its initial public offering at $40 a share — below its originally targeted range of $47 to $55. The company sold 37.5 million shares, raising roughly $1.5 billion, in what commentators called the largest US tech IPO since UiPath’s 2021 debut and the largest AI-related listing by amount raised on record. Shares opened at $39, traded as low as $37.46 during the session, and closed the day flat at the $40 offer price, giving the company a fully diluted valuation of about $23 billion.

The muted debut was notable given the run-up: reports ahead of pricing had floated valuations as high as $35 billion, and the deal was seen as a market test of appetite for AI-infrastructure companies whose business depended heavily on debt-financed GPU purchases and concentrated customer relationships, including a large contract with Microsoft and deep financial and supply ties to Nvidia, which was both an investor and a major hardware supplier. CoreWeave had begun in 2017 as a cryptocurrency-mining operation before pivoting to renting out its GPU clusters for AI training and inference.

As the first pure-play AI infrastructure company to go public, CoreWeave’s IPO functioned as an early readout on how public markets would price the AI compute buildout, distinct from the venture and private markets where valuations for AI infrastructure had been rising sharply. The stock’s flat first-day performance, against a backdrop of high private valuations elsewhere in AI, was read by some commentators as a note of caution about how sustainable that private-market pricing was.