Coreweave, the $19 billion cloud computing company that provides AI computing resources to businesses, has officially opened its first two data centers in the UK. This is the first data center outside the US domestic market.
CoreWeave opened its European headquarters in London last May, shortly after reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion to $19 billion. billion in funding. At the same time, the company announced plans to open two data centers as part of a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) investment in the UK. Today's news coincides with another announcement from the UK Government detailing a five-year investment plan to strengthen the UK Government. Geographic “AI growth zones” that include government-owned AI computing capacity and private sector AI infrastructure.
Rachel Reeves, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: “This investment is a huge vote of confidence in the UK's digital technology sector and is exactly the kind of thing we want as we grow our economy and leverage AI to drive efficiency. ” he said. statement.
The company said CoreWeave's first data center in the UK went live quietly in October in Crawley, and its second hub went live in London Docklands in December. Both locations use Nvidia's Hopper GPUs (graphics processing units), which are based on upgraded H200 series chips designed for high performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads.
From cryptocurrencies to AI computing
Founded in 2017, CoreWeave got its start with a focus on cryptocurrency mining, but has also expanded into AI computing, the processing power and processing power needed to perform computational tasks such as running algorithms and running machine learning models. As demand for its infrastructure skyrocketed, the company repurposed this GPU infrastructure for such workloads.
CoreWeave is one of a number of cloud infrastructure startups looking to ride the wave of AI hype, including domestic European players such as France's FlexAI. DataCrunch is based in Finland. And Nebius, based in the Netherlands, was born from the ashes of Russian internet giant Yandex.
CoreWeave announced that it has opened 28 data centers by the end of 2024, including two new data centers that it officially announced today. Separately, the company also plans to build 10 new data centers in 2025, three of which will be located in Europe, including the previously announced three in Norway, Sweden and Spain. I plan to