Magnetar Capital and funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities led the formation of a $2.3 billion debt financing facility for specialized cloud provider CoreWeave, which is looking to expand is fleet and open new data centers.
The deal follows a $221 million Series B and a $200 million Series B extension funding rounds that were done earlier this year and were led by $13 billion Magnetar.
“We are incredibly proud to expand our years-long partnership with CoreWeave through this important transaction that positions the company for long-term growth and success,” said David Snyderman, chief investment officer and managing partner at Magnetar Capital. “As AI becomes increasingly integrated into businesses and society at large, CoreWeave is well equipped to meet the world’s increasing need for high performance compute and serve as a value-added provider to each of its customers.”
Additional strategic participation in the latest debt facility came from Coatue and DigitalBridge Credit. Other investors include BlackRock, PIMCO and Carlyle.
Roseland, N.J.-based CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and is known for powering the large language model (LLM) and generative AI boom with its “ultraperformant” cloud infrastructure.
“AI has the potential to transform the way we engage with technology, power the industries of the future, and make society’s vital services more efficient – as long as the infrastructure is in place to deliver performance at scale,” said Michael Intrator, CoreWeave CEO and co-founder. “CoreWeave is delivering on this unprecedented level of demand with the most reliable, flexible, and highly performant compute resources to lead the industry forward. The new resources from these world class investors are a vote of confidence in our accomplishments to date and validate our future strategy.”
Jasvinder Khaira, a Blackstone senior managing director, said: “Blackstone’s investment in CoreWeave aligns perfectly with our focus on AI and digital infrastructure, and takes advantage of our scale and flexibility to offer innovative financial solutions to market leaders.”
Earlier this month, CoreWeave announced a new $1.6 billion data center in Plano, Texas. The company anticipates a fleet of 14 data centers to be in place by the end of 2023. Last month, CoreWeave unveiled the world’s fastest AI supercomputer built in partnership with NVIDIA, measured by an industry standard benchmark test called the MLPerf.
CoreWeave’s publicly available supercomputing infrastructure trained the new MLPerf GPT-3 175B large language model (LLM) in under 11 minutes, which was more than 29x faster than the next best competitor and 4x larger than the next best competitor.
