CoreWeave doesn't sit around. Fresh off a major funding round that valued the GPU cloud company at a reported $19 billion, the New Jersey startup has opened an office in London that will serve as its European headquarters.
Additionally, Coreweave announced it will open two data centers in the UK this year as part of a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) investment. This is the first of its kind outside the United States.
Founded in 2017, CoreWeave is one of the AI-focused cloud computing companies benefiting from the recent AI explosion, including the generative AI hype sparked by OpenAI's ChatGPT. CoreWeave provides access to cloud-based AI “computing,” the infrastructure and resources needed to perform computational tasks such as processing data and running machine learning models.
Developers building AI applications need access to graphics processing units (GPUs), which are typically rented for a period of time, making them complex to set up and manage, and costly to run. It's also expensive. CoreWeave makes this processing power available on-demand and at scale, offering a variety of Nvidia GPUs to address a variety of developer use cases.
Many players have emerged and are gaining funding in this nascent space. Lambda raised a hefty $320 million a few months ago, and last month French startup FlexAI emerged from stealth with his $30 million, but its focus is on his Nvidia as well as the deployment of AI models across multiple architectures.
CoreWeave is one of the frontrunners in the GPU cloud space. The company announced last week that it had raised $1.1 billion in this round, nearly tripling the valuation from its previously reported $7 billion in December. This is the AI gold rush, and NVIDIA's own market cap has quadrupled to more than $2 trillion in the past 12 months.
UK and AI
The UK is considered one of the top countries for R&D investment in AI, after the US and China. Google's DeepMind is based in the UK capital, and Microsoft recently similarly committed $3.15 billion to building AI infrastructure in the UK over the next few years. . The Redmond-based giant's newly formed consumer AI division will also gain its first international hub in London, with former Inflection and DeepMind scientist Jordan Hoffmann heading the division. I am.
AI talent acquisition will further intensify across the UK over the next few years A spokesperson for CoreWeave said the new headquarters will be based just off Brick Lane in east London and will employ around 30 people across software engineering. The company said it plans to hire staff from around the world. Supports engineering, operations, finance, and market development roles.
Similar to cloud computing in general, setting up a localized “computing” infrastructure means lower latency and better application performance for businesses in that region. Given CoreWeave's plans to open two data centers in the UK by the end of this year, it's safe to say that the company was probably already working on these plans before today's announcement.
This also means that by the end of 2024, CoreWeave will be operating 28 data centers around the world, although the company is not currently disclosing that number. As of the end of 2023, there were 14 cases, all located in the United States.
“We are seeing unprecedented demand for AI infrastructure, and London is a key AI hub in which we are investing,” CoreWeave CEO and co-founder Mike Intrater said in a statement. “Expanding our physical presence in the UK is an important milestone in the next phase of CoreWeave’s growth.”