AI profits are still a mystery to investors. A new IPO filing holds clues.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Cloud firms that rent out servers have been some of the early winners in the AI revolution. Some of the early winners in the AI boom are the cloud companies that rent out servers—primarily Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
But investors have had to take the promise of these so-called hyperscalers somewhat on faith—the economic value of AI cloud computing is obscured within the financial reporting of the tech giants, whose cloud units are mainly filled with traditional servers for websites, games, apps, and the like. But there’s a new window into AI cloud growth, thanks to the recent prospectus for the initial public offering of CoreWeave, which is planning to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol CRWV. CoreWeave’s only business is renting out AI servers.
That’s currently a fast-growing but small portion of Big Tech’s business, though it seems to be the main thing investors care about. Given their focus, Big Tech investors should be thrilled by CoreWeave’s initial success. CoreWeave started in 2016 as a crypto mining firm.
After the 2018 bitcoin crash, it had to find a new use case for its idle servers, so it started renting them out for AI computing. When ChatGPT made its debut in November 2022, CoreWeave was at the right place at the right time. CoreWeave is a pure AI play, perhaps even more than AI leader Nvidia.
It has been a venture capital darling since the AI boom began, raising $2.2 billion, most recently at a $23 billion valuation in November, according to FactSet. Now that CoreWeave’s financials for 2022 to 2024 are public, investors can see what it takes for the hyperscalers to run AI cloud services, unobscured by their consolidated reporting. And there is lots of
. Read on livemint.com