OpenAI has agreed an $11.9 billion deal to buy services from CoreWeave, which will see it take an equity stake in the AI cloud provider.
The five-year tie-up has been signed ahead of CoreWeave’s stock market debut, which is expected to happen in the next few weeks via an IPO. It will see OpenAI receive CoreWeave equity worth $350 million.
CoreWeave, which provides GPUs to clients including Meta and Microsoft, is hoping to raise more than $4 billion at a $35 billion valuation when it goes public.
"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 CEO 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."
OpenAI has previously used Microsoft data center infrastructure to train and run its AI models. Microsoft is also a major customer of CoreWeave, accounting for more than half of the latter's revenue.
Microsoft has been OpenAI’s sole cloud provider since 2023 when it invested billions of dollars in the ChatGPT maker, becoming its biggest shareholder in the process.
However, in recent months OpenAI has started to look elsewhere to obtain the massive amounts of compute power it requires - with Microsoft now only having the right of first refusal on new capacity.
In January it announced Stargate - a $500 billion joint venture with Oracle, SoftBank, and Abu Dhabi's MGX to deploy a number of large data centers across the US. Infrastructure worth $100 billion will be deployed imminently, though the rest of the money has yet to be raised.
OpenAI recently told investors that it expects Stargate to provide three-quarters of the compute power needed to run and develop its AI models by 2030, but in the meantime it seems it will be leaning on CoreWeave’s infrastructure.
"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."
