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If ever there was a canary in the coalmine for signs of peak bubbliciousness, it is/was the CoreWeave IPO.

The spinoff from Nvidia is a specialized cloud computing company that provides high-performance, GPU-accelerated infrastructure tailored for AI and machine learning workloads, operating a growing network of data centers across the United States and Europe to support its services.

In other words, it's right at the heart of the supposed CapEx boom.

But, Semafor's Liz Hofman reports this morning that the IPO valuation has been drastically downsized:

Additionally, they have reduced the IPO size to around $1.5 billion (from around $3 billion).

Here's the potential problem: 

CoreWeave has been compared to WeWork because its tremendous revenue growth has come at the expense of unsustainable capex and cash burn, which in  turn require tremendous constant outside investment (or debt): CoreWeave  burned nearly $6 billion of cash in 2024 and $1.1 billion the previous year, because of the massive capex to build out its AI infrastructure.

Not surprisingly, CoreWeave – which also counts Microsoft as its largest customer – has been frequently rumored to be a core spoke in revenue roundtripping schemes involving Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAi.

As Semafor writes, CoreWeave’s public-market debut isn’t just a closely watched bellwether for AI, but for the IPO market overall, which has been in a deep freeze.

For now, NVDA shares are unmoved by the report (did everyone know yesterday?)

Tick tock on this AI bubble?

Is TDCowen and BABA's Tsai right, this time?