Seven Things To Know About CoreWeave’s S-1: Top Customers, Revenue And More

Ahead of a plan to go public, rising AI cloud provider CoreWeave reveals fast-growing revenue from a ‘limited number of customers,’ including Microsoft, and how it has scaled GPU-powered data centers over the last three years to compete with rivals such as Amazon Web Services.

CoreWeave, a rising AI cloud provider, has revealed fast-growing revenue from a “limited number of customers,” including Microsoft, and how it has scaled its GPU-powered data centers over the last three years ahead of a plan to go public.

The Livingston, N.J.-based company shared the details in its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, where it also shared how it competes against much larger cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

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CoreWeave is part of a group of smaller cloud service providers focused on developing AI services that are primarily powered by Nvidia GPUs, and the company said it often beats rivals when it comes to launching services based on new chips and systems like Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell GB200 NVL72 rack-scale server platform.

In the S-1 filing, CoreWeave said its proprietary software and cloud services “deliver the software and software intelligence needed to manage complex AI infrastructure at scale.”

“Our platform supports the development and use of ground-breaking models and the delivery of the next generation of AI applications that are changing the way we live and work across the globe,” the company wrote.

What follows are seven highlights from CoreWeave’s S-1, including how much revenue it makes from top customers such as Microsoft, how its revenue and net losses have grown over the last three years and its direct sales strategy.

CoreWeave Revenue Soared As Losses Widened Over Last Three Years

CoreWeave reported that its annual revenue grew exponentially over the last three years as the company’s net losses widened by a significant percentage.

While CoreWeave’s revenue in 2024 grew 737 percent to $1.9 billion, its net loss expanded by 45 percent to $863 million that year. The company experienced a larger leap in revenue and net loss the previous year, with the former growing by 1,331 percent to $229 million and the latter increasing by 1,816 percent to $594 million.

In 2022, CoreWeave experienced a net loss of $31 million on $16 million of revenue.

CoreWeave Significantly Expanded GPU Capacity

The steep rise in revenue and net losses coincided with CoreWeave significantly expanding its GPU data center capacity over the last three years.

By the end of last year, CoreWeave had 250,000 GPUs online, most of which were Nvidia’s Hopper-based models, across 32 data centers supported by 360 megawatts of power.

This represented a more than quadrupling of CoreWeave’s capacity in 2023, when it had 53,000 GPUs across 10 data centers supported by 70 megawatts. In the previous year, it had three data centers with more than 17,000 GPUs and 10 megawatts.

CoreWeave said it is “consistently” among the first cloud service providers to introduce “cutting-edge infrastructure components,” including Nvidia’s H100 and H200 GPUs as well as its BlueField-2 and BlueField-3 data processing units (DPUs).

The company said it was the first cloud provider to launch instances based on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell GB200 NVL72 rack-scale platform.

“We are able to deploy the newest chips in our infrastructure and provide the compute capacity to customers in as little as two weeks from receipt from our OEM partners such as Dell and Super Micro,” CoreWeave wrote.

Microsoft Has Been CoreWeave’s Largest Customer

While CoreWeave has grown its revenue by several magnitudes over the past three years, it said a “substantial portion” of that comes from a “limited number of customers.”

That includes Microsoft, which was its largest customer in 2023 and 2024, when it accounted for 35 percent and 62 percent of revenue, respectively.

CoreWeave said its two largest customers accounted for 77 percent of revenue in 2024. This means, with Microsoft making up 62 percent of revenue last year, the second largest customer contributed 15 percent of its revenue in that 12-month period.

“None of our other customers represented 10 percent or more of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024,” the company wrote.

In 2022 and 2023, CoreWeave’s three largest customers made up 41 percent and 73 percent of revenue for those years, respectively. The company’s top customer in 2022 contributed 16 percent of its revenue that year.

The company said it expects to “continue to derive a significant portion of our revenue from a limited number of customers for the foreseeable future,” adding that “in some cases, the portion of our revenue attributable to certain customers may increase in the future.”

While CoreWeave didn’t identify any other top customers, the company said elsewhere that it works with Nvidia, IBM, Meta, Mistral and Cohere.

Why CoreWeave’s Limited Customer Base Could Be A Problem

CoreWeave highlighted its limited number of customers in the section of its S-1 filing where it described various risk factors and explained why they could be a problem.

“Any negative changes in demand from Microsoft, in Microsoft’s ability or willingness to perform under its contracts with us, in laws or regulations applicable to Microsoft or the regions in which it operates, or in our broader strategic relationship with Microsoft would adversely affect our business, operating results, financial condition, and future prospects,” the company wrote.

CoreWeave said it could also have trouble maintaining or increasing revenue from top customers for a “variety of reasons,” including customers that develop competitive offerings, customers that “redesign their systems to require fewer of our services,” and customers that have relationships with competitors.

How CoreWeave Views Competitors Like AWS, Microsoft Azure

CoreWeave said its primary competitors are “larger, global enterprises that offer general- purpose cloud computing as part of a broader, diversified product portfolio.” These include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle and IBM.

But the company said it has advantages, even if it’s significantly smaller.

“While these businesses have greater resources than us across sales and marketing and research and development, and benefit from broad brand awareness, they are not purpose-built for the AI and accelerated compute use cases that we serve,” it wrote.

“As a result, some of these very competitors have become customers of, and partners to, CoreWeave in a number of cases, demonstrating our competitive differentiation and ability to deliver highly performant, purpose-built infrastructure that outperforms existing general purpose cloud solutions today,” CoreWeave added.

The company also pointed out that it competes with smaller cloud service providers such as Crusoe and Lambda.

CoreWeave said there are several reasons why it has a competitive advantage, including its “proven track record of delivering performance and reliability at scale,” “the scale of its GPU clusters” as well as its “price, total cost of ownership and transparency.”

Committed Contracts Drove Most Of CoreWeave’s 2024 Revenue

CoreWeave has increasingly leaned on committed contracts with customers to make and grow revenue over the last three years.

“Revenue from committed contracts is derived from sales of access to our CoreWeave Cloud Platform where customers reserve capacity over the contract length, typically two to five years, on a take-or-pay basis,” the company wrote.

Last year, committed contracts accounted for 96 percent of CoreWeave’s revenue, up from 88 percent in 2023 and 20 percent in 2022.

These committed contracts are with “AI labs and AI enterprises who require massive volumes of specialized compute at scale for high-intensity AI workloads,” according to CoreWeave. A “vast majority” of that revenue comes with customers with “investment grade ratings, giving us confidence in the expected cash flows from these contracts.”

CoreWeave Says It Has a Direct Sales Strategy

CoreWeave said that it employs a direct sales strategy, but it will increasingly lean on partnerships to “extend our customer reach.”

“Our sales organization is focused on a direct named account strategy to drive demand from the world’s leading AI labs and AI enterprises. We supplement this with a product-led growth motion serving individual users and developers working at AI labs and AI enterprises,” the company wrote.

While CoreWeave said it will continue to lean on direct sales as it ramps up investments in its sales and marketing organization, the company will lean on partnerships, although it did not specify whether these would be channel partners, ISVs, OEMs or another partner type.

“We intend to further invest in sales and marketing to target broader enterprise customers on a direct basis over time, leveraging partnerships with other participants in the data infrastructure and AI ecosystem to extend our customer reach, and further penetrate our total addressable market opportunity,” the company wrote.