Nvidia invests $2B in CoreWeave, deepening its bet on U.S. AI data center infrastructure

Nvidia is putting serious money behind the physical backbone of artificial intelligence. The chipmaker has committed $2 billion to CoreWeave, turning the AI cloud provider into one of its largest equity bets and signaling just how central data centers have become to the next phase of AI growth.

The announcement landed Monday morning and quickly moved markets. CoreWeave shares jumped 9% in premarket trading as investors digested the scale of Nvidia’s commitment and what it says about demand for U.S.-based AI infrastructure.

“NVIDIA has invested $2 billion in CoreWeave Class A common stock at a purchase price of $87.20 per share. The investment reflects NVIDIA’s confidence in CoreWeave’s business, team and growth strategy as a cloud platform built on NVIDIA infrastructure,” Coreweave said in a news release.

The deal arrives only months after OpenAI dramatically expanded its own partnership with CoreWeave. That agreement added as much as $6.5 billion to existing contracts, pushing the total value of OpenAI’s deals with the company to roughly $22.4 billion. Taken together, the moves show how tightly intertwined AI model builders and infrastructure providers have become.

CoreWeave sits at the center of a fast-growing group of so-called neocloud companies. These firms supply specialized hardware and cloud capacity for training and running AI systems, filling gaps left by traditional hyperscalers. Demand has surged as enterprises move from experimentation to production, putting pressure on land, power, and compute resources.

Nvidia’s capital is aimed squarely at that constraint. CoreWeave plans to use the funds to speed up land acquisition and power access for new data centers across the United States. The company has set an ambitious target of more than 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity by 2030, a scale that puts it closer to the world’s largest infrastructure operators than a typical startup.

The investment values CoreWeave shares at $87.20 each and adds roughly 23 million shares to Nvidia’s position. That nearly doubles Nvidia’s stake, according to Reuters calculations based on LSEG data. Before the transaction, Nvidia held a 6.3% stake, or about 24.3 million shares, making it the company’s third-largest shareholder.

The growing web of investments has drawn scrutiny from some investors, particularly as Nvidia backs multiple AI companies that depend on its hardware. Questions around circular financing have followed similar moves involving OpenAI and other infrastructure players. A CoreWeave spokesperson pushed back on that idea, telling Reuters that the new cash will not be used to buy Nvidia processors. The funds are earmarked for data center expansion, research and development, and hiring.

CoreWeave’s rise has been swift. Founded in 2017 as a cryptocurrency mining company, it pivoted after the crypto downturn and rebuilt itself around leasing Nvidia GPUs to AI developers. That bet paid off. Microsoft is now its largest customer, joined by Meta, IBM, and Cohere. As CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator put it, “Nvidia is the leading and most requested computing platform at every phase of AI … ‍This expanded collaboration underscores the strength of demand we are seeing across our customer base.”

For Nvidia, the message is clear. AI leadership no longer rests solely on chips. Control over where those chips run, and how quickly capacity can scale, is becoming just as decisive.