Specializing in GPU acceleration services, CoreWeave borrowed some $2.3 billion… using a somewhat unusual guarantee: NVIDIA H100 graphics cards. A first.
Failing to be a safe haven, NVIDIA business cards can now be used to facilitate the borrowing of large sums of money by certain tech players. We learn by AnandTech (thanks to Reuters) that GPU acceleration specialist CoreWeave borrowed $2.3 billion using its numerous NVIDIA “Hopper” H100 graphics cards as collateral. As a reminder, these are sold for more than 40,000 dollars each.
CoreWeave and NVIDIA… a business that works
The significant individual value of these GPUs therefore allows CoreWeave to borrow a colossal sum to support, at the best time, its growth in the midst of the boom in demand for AI and the HPC sector. We learn in particular that these 2.3 billion will be used by the group for the purchase of even more GPUs, but also for the construction of new data centers (including one announced in Texas for 1.6 billion dollars) and the hiring of the staff who will go with it.
This investment comes as the company has reaped huge benefits from the rise of various generative AIs in recent months. It has also benefited a great deal from its partnership with NVIDIA for the acquisition of the H100 GPUs, which it now uses as collateral… but which have also done it a great favor against the competition.
As reminded AnandTech, more and more AI applications are indeed being developed for NVIDIA’s CUDA platform, available only with the brand’s GPUs. The fleet of NVIDIA H100 GPUs has therefore given CoreWeave a significant competitive advantage over other players such as AWS, Google, or even Microsoft, who mainly use other solutions. It even allowed the company to make certain competitors its customers for certain markets.
A titanic loan
In addition to the security represented by the company’s many H100 GPUs, the loan taken out by CoreWeave is therefore made possible, in large part, by this very favorable context for the group.
Note that CoreWeave is however not the only start-up to invest heavily in NVIDIA solutions for strategic purposes. Last month, for example, Inflection AI built a supercomputer worth hundreds of millions of dollars…equipped with some 22,000 NVIDIA H100 graphics cards.
Source : AnandTech
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