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CoreWeave slashed the size and value of its hotly anticipated initial public offering, another sign of wavering investor demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure on Wall Street.
The cloud computing provider raised $1.5bn when it floated its shares on Thursday evening, according to people familiar with the matter. CoreWeave had initially targeted raising $4bn and dropped that figure to $2.7bn when it began a roadshow to generate interest for its shares last week.
CoreWeave sold 37.5mn shares at $40 a piece, having initially hoped to sell about 49mn shares for between $47 and $55 a share. The new price will give the company a market value of roughly $23bn when it begins trading on the Nasdaq in New York on Friday morning.
Nvidia, which already owns about 6 per cent of CoreWeave, was set to buy about $250mn of the shares, the people familiar with the matter said ahead of the pricing late on Thursday. The chipmaker is also one of CoreWeave’s largest suppliers and among its biggest customers.
The reductions mark a dramatic climbdown for what is still expected to be one of the biggest tech listings of the year. CoreWeave was last valued at $23bn in its most recent private market valuation in October 2024. Initial discussions with its bankers sought to value the company at more than $35bn in the IPO.
CoreWeave and Nvidia declined to comment.
Thursday’s share sale was closely watched as a sign that a years-long frozen period for tech IPOs is over. Fintech start-ups Klarna and Chime, retail trading platform eToro and ticketing group StubHub have also filed for listings and are expected to float in the next two months.
US natural gas exporter Venture Global, which was billed as a blockbuster IPO, has fallen more than 50 per cent since it went public in late January.
The Financial Times this week reported CoreWeave violated several terms of a $7.6bn loan last year, triggering so-called technical defaults.
The New Jersey-based company has attracted intense scrutiny in recent weeks for its large debt burden, close relationship with Nvidia and forthcoming maturities on billions of dollars of loans. CoreWeave’s largest customer, Microsoft, walked away from some of its commitments to the company, the FT reported this month. CoreWeave denied contracts had been cancelled.
The planned listing comes as the Trump administration’s aggressive trade agenda has roiled US equity markets in recent weeks, hitting shares in tech companies particularly hard.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor index, which tracks 30 of the world’s biggest chipmakers, has lost 11 per cent this year. Nvidia has slipped 19 per cent over the same period.
Alibaba chair Joe Tsai on Tuesday warned of a potential “bubble” emerging in data centre construction, further denting investor sentiment in the middle of CoreWeave’s pre-IPO investor roadshow. JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are acting as lead underwriters on the deal.
This story has been amended to clarify Nvidia’s role in the IPO
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