CoreWeave Inc. is negotiating a secondary sale will that enable investors to offload $400 million to $500 million worth of shares, Bloomberg reported today.

The paper’s sources said that the deal is set to value CoreWeave, which operates a cloud platform optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, at $23 billion. That’s up from $19.1 billion in May and $7 billion last December. The steep valuation boost reportedly expected by the company hints that it’s experiencing significant revenue growth.

Its cloud platform enables developers to train AI models and run inference workloads. Customers include generative AI startups, large enterprises and at least one competing cloud provider. In January, CNBC reported that Microsoft Corp. had commissioned up to billions of dollars worth of infrastructure from CoreWeave to power OpenAI’s models.

CoreWeave will be one of the first cloud providers to offer Nvidia Corp.’s latest Blackwell B200 graphics processing unit. The chip, which debuted in March, is significantly faster than its predecessor and includes a module that can forecast hardware issues. The latter feature is designed to ease the maintenance of large-scale AI clusters like those that cloud providers such as CoreWeave operate.

The company plans to deploy B200 chips as part of Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 appliances. Those are liquid-cooled, rack-size systems that feature 72 B200 chips and 36 central processing units with 1.4 exaflops of combined performance. The NVL72 also includes Nvidia’s BlueField-3 processor, which offloads some computing tasks from the other chips in the system to leave more compute capacity for AI workloads.

CoreWeave’s product portfolio is not limited to AI hardware. It also offers Nvidia Corp. graphics cards that are optimized to run rendering applications rather than machine learning workloads. 

Users can connect their AI instances to the public web using the company’s networking service, which offers up to 100 gigabits per second of internet-facing bandwidth per node. That bandwidth can be used for tasks such as processing requests from users of a chatbot service. On the storage side, CoreWeave creates three copies of customers’ records to reduce the likelihood of data loss.

According to today’s report, the company intends to follow up the secondary sale it’s currently planning with an initial public offering. It’s expected to list its shares as early as next year.

One of the investors that would stand to realize a potentially significant return through an IPO is Nvidia. The chipmaker bought shares in CoreWeave last April at a $2 billion valuation, or less than one tenth what the cloud provider could reportedly be worth following its planned tender offer. 

Image: CoreWeave