Nvidia-Backed CoreWeave IPO: 5 Things Investors Need To Know Before Buying Shares

One of the most anticipated IPOs of 2025 is nearly here. CoreWeave CRWV is set to make its public debut in a test of how much growth investors still see in the artificial intelligence sector.

CoreWeave plans to sell 49 million shares at a price between $47 and $55. Of the total shares offered, 47.18 million will come from the company with 1.82 million sold by existing shareholders.

Here's a look at five things investors should know about the AI Hyperscaler company ahead of its IPO.

Key Customers: CoreWeave is well-known in the AI sector and could have a hot IPO, thanks to a key customer base that includes several of the largest technology and semiconductor companies.

"Our CoreWeave Cloud platform consists of our proprietary software and cloud services that deliver the software and software intelligence needed to manage complex AI infrastructure at scale," the company wrote in its IPO filing.

CoreWeave lists Cohere, International Business Machines, Meta Platforms, Microsoft Corporation MSFT, Mistral AI, NVIDIA Corporation NVDA and OpenAI as some of its customers.

The company gets most of its revenue from multi-year committed contracts, and having this strong base of well-known names could help increase demand for the IPO.

Microsoft is highlighted as CoreWeave's biggest customer, making up 35% of revenue in 2023 and 62% in 2024. The company said its three largest customers made up 41% of its revenue in 2022 and 73% in 2023. For 2024, the company's two largest customers comprised 77% of revenue.

Going forward, CoreWeave expects Microsoft to represent less than 50% of future committed contract revenue. While having these key customers could be a positive, investors should also know the risk of being too concentrated with one customer.

Thanks to a new Master Services Agreement signed earlier this month, OpenAI could become one of the company's largest customers going forward. Under the Agreement, OpenAI will pay up to $11.9 billion through October 2030.

Nvidia, OpenAI Investments: While Nvidia is listed as a key customer, the semiconductor giant is also one of the largest shareholders of CoreWeave owning 5.96% of the company. After the IPO, the ownership stake is expected to be $5.05% according to the company's filing.

Nvidia may increase its ownership stake in the company, thanks to the IPO. CNBC reported Thursday that the semiconductor giant plans to anchor the IPO at $40 per share with a $250 million order.

OpenAI is also planning to invest in CoreWeave after the IPO as part of the recently signed master services agreement. In a private placement after the IPO, OpenAI will invest $350 million in the company at a price equal to the IPO price.

Triple-Digit Revenue Growth: CoreWeave’s revenue was $1.9 billion in 2024, up 737% from the previous year.

The company's revenue has increased substantially in recent years, going from $16 million in 2022 to $229 million in 2023 to $1.9 billion in 2024.

While the company has had strong revenue growth, CoreWeave still had net losses each of the last three years as it invested back in the company and future growth. The company's net loss was $863 million in 2024.

CoreWeave ended the 2024 fiscal year with $15.1 billion in remaining performance obligations, which is future revenue for existing customers.

AI Growth: Artificial intelligence has been one of the hottest sectors for companies and investors over the last two years, and CoreWeave's IPO timing and valuation could impact overall perceptions of the sector.

"AI represents the new major evolution of technology, and its impact is potentially greater than the transformational shifts of the past," the company said.

CoreWeave said a combination of demand and supply side factors are leading to the "unprecedented growth of AI." Demand side factors include the significant advancements of AI, improved outcomes for businesses and individuals from AI and AI becoming a strategic priority for organizations.

Supply-side factors include the rapidly growing amount of data, effective foundational models, and evolving infrastructure to enable AI workloads.

"We believe that specialized compute infrastructure is the key enabler that AI labs and AI enterprises need to train models, perform inference faster at scale, and accelerate their time to market."

CoreWeave says it is purpose-built for AI. The company has 32 data centers and over 250,000 GPUS online.

"We believe AI is the next frontier for innovation in technology, driving productivity and efficiency gains and enabling new business models in nearly every industry and organization."

Growth Strategies: Another key item found in most IPO filings is a company's growth strategies. This list can include what they will use the proceeds from the IPO for and how they will continue past revenue growth after going public.

Here are CoreWeave's growth strategies:

Extend our product leadership and innovation
Continue capturing additional workloads from existing customers
Extend into broader enterprise customers across new industries and verticals
Expand internationally
Increase our vertical integration
Maximize the economic life of our infrastructure

Investors will be closely watching to see if CoreWeave’s IPO prices at the mid-point of its IPO range or higher and how the stock performs during its first day of trading. Failure to do so could cause these growth strategies to need to happen more quickly to justify the company’s current valuation.

Read Next: