CoreWeave Acquires Weights & Biases, Signaling IPO Momentum
Cloud-based artificial intelligence infrastructure company CoreWeave Inc. has announced its intention to acquire Weights & Biases Inc., a firm specializing in AI model development. The deal, reportedly valued at $1.4 billion, comes as CoreWeave prepares to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
CoreWeave has quickly become a key player in the AI sector. The company provides enterprises with access to the graphics processing units (GPUs) that are essential for running today’s complex AI services. CoreWeave’s cloud infrastructure offers on-demand access to advanced GPUs from Nvidia, including the H100 and H200 chips. These powerful chips are designed to accelerate computing for large language models and other AI workloads.
Weights & Biases, based in San Francisco, has built a platform to streamline the AI model development process. The company has raised over $250 million since its founding in 2017. The platform offers AI developers a range of tools for tasks like managing training datasets, testing model performance, and troubleshooting technical issues. Weights & Biases also provides specialized features to address issues such as “hallucinations,” or erroneous responses sometimes generated by large language models. The platform has seen significant adoption, with more than 1 million AI engineers using it, including those from companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, Snowflake, and Toyota.
CoreWeave plans to integrate Weights & Biases’ features into its cloud infrastructure platform to create a more encompassing “end-to-end” AI experience for its customers. Clients will be able to both run their models in the cloud and build and test their own. The combined technologies are intended to help customers accelerate their AI roadmaps and bring new applications to market more quickly. Weights & Biases will continue to allow its existing customers to deploy their AI models wherever they choose, so they are not forced onto CoreWeave’s cloud infrastructure.
Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. noted that CoreWeave’s move recognizes the trend of enterprises seeking comprehensive AI solutions which simplify AI application and model development. “They want a turnkey cloud platform that lets them build and operate their next-generation AI applications and do everything associated with them in one place, and that’s what CoreWeave aims to give them,” he stated.
Michael Intrator, CoreWeave co-founder and CEO, described Weights & Biases as a “phenomenal platform” that assists companies in managing the complexities of building, deploying, and monitoring AI models. Lukas Biewald, CEO of Weights & Biases, said: “Together with CoreWeave, we will bring this grit and passion for innovation to customers at an even greater scale, with the goal of rapidly accelerating adoption across the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises.”
The acquisition is subject to standard closing conditions and is expected to be completed in the first half of the year. The deal adds urgency to CoreWeave’s plans for an initial public offering on the Nasdaq, which was announced just yesterday. CoreWeave revealed in its IPO filing that revenue surged by 700% in fiscal year 2024, reaching $1.92 billion. The company anticipates continued growth, with over $15 billion in signed contracts yet to be fulfilled. While the company is currently operating at a loss, reporting a loss of $863.4 million, the planned acquisition and IPO demonstrate its ambitious plans to become a leader in the AI cloud infrastructure space.
