CoreWeave Signs $6.5B Deal with OpenAI to Help Reduce Reliance on Microsoft

TradingKey - On Thursday, local time, AI cloud infrastructure provider CoreWeave announced a new cooperation agreement worth $6.5 billion with OpenAI. This latest contract brings the total value of its agreements with the ChatGPT developer to $22.4 billion, further deepening the strategic partnership between the two companies.

This collaboration represents another major expansion of the partnership between the two companies this year. In March, CoreWeave signed a five-year, $11.9 billion contract for data center and technical services with OpenAI, which was subsequently increased by $4 billion in May.

“We are proud to expand our relationship with OpenAI, a company consistently at the forefront of advancing artificial intelligence,” said Michael Intrator, co-founder, chairman and CEO of CoreWeave.

Intrator emphasized that this collaboration, “This milestone affirms the trust that world-leading innovators have in CoreWeave’s ability to power the most demanding inference and training workloads at an unmatched pace.”

Intrator also noted that renewing the contract with OpenAI marks CoreWeave's progress in revenue diversification and reducing dependence on Microsoft. Microsoft was previously OpenAI's exclusive infrastructure provider and contributed 60% of CoreWeave's revenue in 2024.

“The opportunity to go about diversifying our clients with some really wonderful, well-known, creditworthy customers is very exciting. When I think about this quarter, this is the quarter of diversification for us," he added.

Peter Hoeschele, OpenAI's Vice President of Infrastructure, stated bluntly that CoreWeave has become a "core partner" for its infrastructure platform: “By delivering compute at unmatched speed and scale, they’re helping us advance the frontier of intelligence and ensure AI‘s benefits reach everyone.”

Behind this collaboration lies the intense global competition for computing power in the AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly stated earlier this week that the computing constraints faced by his company and the entire industry are “have been terrible,” acknowledging that “We’re so limited right now in the services we can offer.”

OpenAI is seeking multiple partners to help build unprecedented data center infrastructure. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to construct three new data center sites with Oracle and two facilities with SoftBank, as its "Stargate" infrastructure initiative moves forward.

CoreWeave was initially a company focused on Ethereum mining, originally named Atlantic Crypto. Given its substantial computing resources and the rise of the AI boom, the company "naturally" transitioned into a GPU infrastructure service provider. During the 2022 AI surge, its early bulk acquisition of high-end NVIDIA GPUs became a key asset, allowing it to rapidly enter the AI infrastructure sector through its hardware advantage.

Since its listing in March this year, CoreWeave's stock price has surged 230%, and it has accelerated its expansion through innovative financing methods (such as borrowing against $2.3 billion worth of H100 GPUs). Currently, CoreWeave operates dozens of data centers across Europe and America and is actively pursuing deals with industry giants.