Cisco, Pure Storage Invest In Nvidia-Backed Startup CoreWeave

'Our strategic collaboration with CoreWeave reflects a shared commitment to delivering AI innovation at scale and marks a major milestone in delivering the flexibility and scalability that AI-driven organizations need to thrive,' says Pure Storage CTO Rob Lee.

Tech giants Cisco and Pure Storage have invested in startup CoreWeave, which is becoming a major player in the AI industry as a top provider of Nvidia GPUs and cloud computing for AI-hungry businesses.

“Our strategic collaboration with CoreWeave reflects a shared commitment to delivering AI innovation at scale and marks a major milestone in delivering the flexibility and scalability that AI-driven organizations need to thrive,” said Pure Storage’s Rob Lee, chief technology officer, in a statement today announcing Pure Storage’s investment in the startup.

Roseland, N.J.-based CoreWeave confirmed it closed a $650 million secondary share sale with Cisco and Pure Storage alongside investment firms including BlackRock, Coatue and Fidelity.

Pure Storage, for its part, said in a statement that it will integrate its platform into CoreWeave’s cloud service environments, which enables customers that require massive scale and flexibility in their infrastructure the ability to tailor their infrastructure and maximize performance.

Cisco has been heavily investing in AI as seen by its massive $28 billion acquisition of Splunk in 2023.

The San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant this year bought AI security trailblazer Robust Intelligence for an undisclosed sum. Cisco also announced its intent to acquire Deeper Insights AI Ltd., a privately held AI services company based in the U.K. Cisco did not respond for comment on its CoreWeave investment by press time.

CoreWeave’s $19 Billion Valuation

In May, CoreWeave had a $19 billion valuation following a $1.1 billion Series C investment round.

Last month, CoreWeave unveiled a $650 million credit line from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Overall, the startup has raised a total of $14 billion.

CoreWeave looks to battle cloud giants AWS and Google Cloud in providing Nvidia GPUs and cloud computing services to companies for AI workloads.

CoreWeave is reportedly eyeing an initial public offering (IPO) in 2025.

CoreWeave’s Nvidia Charge

Last year, Nvidia made an undisclosed investment in CoreWeave. The startup became the first cloud provider to bring Nvidia H200 Tensor Core GPUs to the market.

This year, Nvidia made available its H200 GPUs via CoreWeave.

CoreWeave recently committed to spending $8.7 billion over 10 years from bitcoin miner Core Scientific with the goal of increasing its data center capacity.

“CoreWeave will also be among the first to market with the revolutionary Nvidia Blackwell platform, which lets organizations everywhere build, train, and serve trillion-parameter large language models more efficiently,” said Brian Venturo, chief strategy officer at CoreWeave, in a recent blog post. “We continue to be laser-focused on meeting the insatiable demand for our infrastructure and managed cloud services.”

Since the start of 2024, CoreWeave has set up nine new data centers globally, with 11 more in progress, Venturo said. “In 2025, we anticipate starting work on 10 more on top of that. That is staggering progress,” he added.

CoreWeave’s cloud architecture is a Kubernetes native cloud that’s purpose-built for large scale, GPU-accelerated workloads. Designed for engineers and developers, CoreWeave offers access to a broad range of compute solutions that the company touts as up to 35-times faster and 80 percent less expensive than legacy cloud providers.