CoreWeave Inc., a cloud compute provider that specializes in large-scale graphics processing unit-accelerated workloads, announced today that it has raised $200 million in additional funding from Magnetar Capital.

The funding is an extension of the company’s previous $221 million Series B round that closed on April 20, also led by Magnetar, which brings the total for the round to $421 million. The round also included contributions from chipmaker Nvidia Corp., former GitHub Chief Executive Nat Friedman and former Apple executive Daniel Gross. In total the company has raised $571 million.

CoreWeave has been riding the wave of generative AI technology and the increased demand for GPU-accelerated workloads that are needed to train, run and fine-tune AI models, which has driven an increased need for specialized infrastructure. The company provides purpose-built cloud compute that’s required in high-capacity workloads for AI training and production. It claims it’s more capable, faster and less expensive than generalized cloud providers.

“In my 25-year career, I’ve never been a part of a company that’s growing like this,” said CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Executive Michael Intrator. “It’s an incredible moment in time. From a demand standpoint, revenue and client scale, the rise has been exponential, and Magnetar has been an amazing partner from the beginning.”

Since its debut in late 2022, OpenAI LP’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT caught the world’s attention with its capabilities of producing human-like conversation, writing poetry, doing research, summarizing documents and producing computer code. Image-producing AI models such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which can create vivid and beautiful artwork and graphics from natural language prompts, also continue to advance.

The potential of this technology has not gone unnoticed by investors. Roughly $1.7 billion in venture capital was raised across 46 deals in the first quarter of 2023, according to PitchBook data. And that doesn’t include Microsoft’s reported $10 billion investment in OpenAI.

“By combining easy access to high-powered GPUs for training AI models with fast and flexible infrastructure and by focusing on a specific type of compute, CoreWeave continues to differentiate itself from other companies in the space,” said Ernie Rogers, Magnetar’s chief operating officer.

Image: CoreWeave