OpenAI has signed a five-year contract with a value up to $11.9 billion with the GPU-heavy cloud service provider CoreWeave on Monday. This deal involves OpenAI receiving $350 million worth of equity in CoreWeave, according to the company’s statement.
The agreement aims for CoreWeave to deliver AI infrastructure to OpenAI, expanding the AI research giant’s compute capacity for training and delivering its latest models at scale for its hundreds of millions of users around the world.
READ: OpenAI releases new ChatGPT version, GPT-4.5 (February 28, 2025)
“Partnering with OpenAI on this net new contract underscores CoreWeave’s proven ability to deliver reliable and performant infrastructure services, powering AI Innovations for world-leading AI labs,” said Michael Intrator, co-founder and chief executive of CoreWeave. “We remain a partner-of-choice to meet the bleeding-edge needs of pioneers to unleash AI’s potential to change the world.”
The private placement is said to be separate from CoreWeave’s planned IPO. While CoreWeave filed to become a public company last week, it has not yet priced, or scheduled its debut. According to an amended IPO filing, the company is seeking a valuation between $27.4 billion and $32 billion — despite the fact that it has nearly $7.5 billion in debt due by the end of next year. A previous Reuters report suggested that CoreWeave is seeking a valuation of more than $35 billion in its New York IPO.
“Advanced AI systems require reliable compute, and we’re excited to continue scaling with CoreWeave so we can train even more powerful models and offer great services to even more users,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “CoreWeave is an important addition to OpenAI’s infrastructure portfolio, complementing our commercial deals with Microsoft and Oracle, and our joint venture with SoftBank on Stargate.”
CoreWeave’s deal with OpenAI is particularly interesting because prior to this deal, CoreWeave’s biggest customer was Microsoft. In fact, in 2024, Microsoft accounted for 62% of CoreWeave’s revenue, which grew to a stunning $1.9 billion — nearly an eightfold increase from just $228.9 million in 2023.
Coreweave, which is backed by Nvidia, runs an AI-specific cloud service with a network of 32 data centers that operated more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of 2024, according to the company. Since then, CoreWeave has added more GPUs, including Nvidia’s latest product, Blackwell, which supports AI reasoning, the company said. Dependence on one customer is considered worrisome for IPO investors, so OpenAI as a direct customer in a multi-billion-dollar deal is expected to appease them.
READ: Nvidia-backed cloud firm CoreWeave files for $35 billion IPO (March 4, 2025)
While Microsoft is a big backer of OpenAI, tensions have risen between the two companies as OpenAI’s fortunes have soared. OpenAI competes with Microsoft for enterprise customers and is even reportedly working on rolling out pricey AI agents.
In January, Microsoft stopped being OpenAI’s sole cloud provider as part of the massive Stargate AI infrastructure deal with SoftBank, Oracle, and others. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on its own AI “reasoning” models comparable to OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini. The tech giant is developing a whole family of its own models called MAI that are competitive with OpenAI. The company has also hired Altman’s rival, Mustafa Suleyman, to lead Microsoft AI.