Coreweave, the $19 billion cloud computing firm that gives corporations with AI compute sources, has formally opened its first two information facilities within the U.Okay. — its first exterior its home U.S. market.
CoreWeave opened its European headquarters in London final May, shortly after hitting a $19 billion valuation off the again of a $1.1. billion fundraise. At the identical time, the corporate introduced plans to open two information facilities as a part of a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) funding within the U.Okay. Today’s information coincides with a separate announcement from the U.Okay. authorities which particulars a five-year funding plan to bolster government-owned AI computing capability, in addition to geographic “AI Growth Zones” which incorporates AI infrastructure from the personal sector.
“This investment is a huge vote of confidence in the U.K.’s digital technology sector, and is exactly the kind we want to see as we grow the economy and use AI to drive efficiency,” Rachel Reeves, U.Okay. Chancellor of the Exchequer, mentioned in a press release.
CoreWeave’s first U.Okay. information heart quietly went stay in Crawley again in October, the corporate mentioned, with the second hub going operational in December in London Docklands. Both areas use Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs (graphical processing items), primarily based on its upgraded H200 collection of chips designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads.
From crypto to AI compute
Founded in 2017, CoreWeave began out with a give attention to crypto mining, however with the surge in demand for AI compute — that’s, the processing energy and infrastructure required to hold out computational duties comparable to operating algorithms and executing machine studying fashions — the corporate repurposed this GPU infrastructure for such workloads.
CoreWeave is one in every of a lot of cloud infrastructure startups seeking to capitalize on the AI hype wave, together with home European gamers comparable to France’s FlexAI; DataCrunch, which is predicated out of Finland; and Netherlands-based Nebius, which emerged from the ashes of Russian web big Yandex.
CoreWeave mentioned that it had opened 28 information facilities by the top of 2024, which incorporates the 2 new ones it formally introduced at the moment. Separately, it’s additionally planning 10 new information facilities in 2025, three of which will probably be in Europe, together with three beforehand introduced areas in Norway, Sweden, and Spain.
