Why Nvidia’s Favorite Cloud Startup Got $7.5 Billion From Blackstone, Others

OpenAI and its artificial intelligence rivals get all the headlines, but few venture-backed companies have benefited more from the AI boom than CoreWeave, a cloud provider. That's thanks to Nvidia, which allocated some of its precious AI server chips to CoreWeave rather than large clouds like Amazon Web Services, prompting startups and even Microsoft to collectively commit to spending billions of dollars to rent CoreWeave’s servers.

On Friday, CoreWeave said it raised $7.5 billion of debt from private equity giant Blackstone and others to buy more chips and expand its U.S. data centers. CoreWeave co-founder Brannin McBee, who's based in Montana and handles the company’s capital raises, said it hopes to roughly double its data center footprint this year to around 300 megawatts of capacity.