Nvidia-backed CoreWeave closes flat at $40 after biggest U.S. tech IPO since 2021

CoreWeave‘s stock opened at $39 and closed at $40 in its Nasdaq debut on Friday after the company sold shares at $40 a piece, below the expected range.

The seller of artificial intelligence technology in the cloud raised $1.5 billion in its share sale, the biggest tech IPO in the U.S. since 2021.

The offering has captured the attention of investors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, as CoreWeave represents the first pure-play AI IPO and the largest tech debut in the U.S. in four years. The IPO market has been largely shut since the end of 2021, as the tech industry reckoned with rising inflation and interest rates.

Tech stocks aren’t doing CoreWeave any favors. The company hit the market on a day that the Nasdaq was off by almost 3%, heading for its worst quarterly performance since mid-2022. The tech-heavy index is down 10% so far this year.

As a supplier to OpenAI, CoreWeave is among the beneficiaries of the generative AI boom that began with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Microsoft, which provides cloud services to OpenAI, is CoreWeave’s biggest customer, accounting for 62% of the company’s $1.92 billion in revenue last year.

CoreWeave rents out access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units to other large tech and AI companies including Meta, IBM and Cohere. Its stiffest competition is coming from the top cloud vendors — Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle.

CoreWeave reported a net loss of $863 million last year, with revenue soaring 737% from a year earlier. It’s a capital-intensive business due to the high costs of renting out and operating data centers. CoreWeave has raised almost $13 billion in debt, with much of that allocated for GPUs that go inside the company’s leased facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

After initially setting its price target at $47 to $55, with a plan to raise about $2.5 billion at the middle of the range, CoreWeave slimmed down the offering, a reflection of investor skepticism.

“There’s a lot of headwinds in the macro,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “And we definitely had to scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was.”

Few tech companies have debuted on U.S. exchanges in recent years. There were just 13 venture-backed technology IPOs in 2022, 2023 and 2024 combined, compared with 77 in the record year of 2021, according to data from Jay Ritter, an emeritus professor of finance at the University of Florida.

CoreWeave’s offering is the largest U.S. IPO since automation software maker UiPath‘s $1.57 billion New York Stock Exchange debut in 2021.

Since CoreWeave filed its prospectus with the SEC on March 3, digital physical therapy company Hinge Health, Swedish online lender Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub have followed. Discord, which runs popular chat software, has hired banks for an IPO, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

Should the deal trade well, CoreWeave’s arrival on Nasdaq might inspire an “AI parade” to the public markets, Mark Klein, CEO of SuRo Capital, which invests in private companies, told CNBC earlier.

Data analytics company Databricks, which partly generates revenue by running AI models on behalf of clients, announced a funding round at a $62 billion valuation in December. OpenAI was closing in on a funding round at a $260 billion valuation last month.

CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and is based in Livingston, New Jersey. The company had 881 employees at the end of 2024. Prior to the IPO, Intrator controlled 38% of CoreWeave’s voting power, while Nvidia held 1%. Other investors include Fidelity and Magnetar.

On Thursday CNBC reported that Nvidia was anchoring the IPO at $40 per share with a $250 million order.

Nvidia is also customer in addition to a key CoreWeave supplier and investor, having paid the cloud provider $320 million as of Dec. 31, according to the prospectus.

WATCH: CoreWeave opens at $39 per share after biggest U.S. tech IPO since 2021