Coreweave, the $19 billion cloud computing firm that gives firms with AI compute assets, has formally opened its first two information facilities within the U.Ok. — its first outdoors 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.Ok. Today’s information coincides with a separate announcement from the U.Ok. 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 funding is a big vote of confidence within the U.Ok.’s digital know-how sector, and is strictly the type we need to see as we develop the financial system and use AI to drive effectivity,” Rachel Reeves, U.Ok. Chancellor of the Exchequer, mentioned in an announcement.
CoreWeave’s first U.Ok. information heart quietly went dwell in Crawley again in October, the corporate mentioned, with the second hub going operational in December in London Docklands. Both places use Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs (graphical processing items), primarily based on its upgraded H200 sequence of chips designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads.
From crypto to AI compute
Founded in 2017, CoreWeave began out with a concentrate on crypto mining, however with the surge in demand for AI compute — that’s, the processing energy and infrastructure required to hold out computational duties corresponding to operating algorithms and executing machine studying fashions — the corporate repurposed this GPU infrastructure for such workloads.
CoreWeave is one in every of various cloud infrastructure startups trying to capitalize on the AI hype wave, together with home European gamers corresponding to France’s FlexAI; DataCrunch, which relies out of Finland; and Netherlands-based Nebius, which emerged from the ashes of Russian web large Yandex.
CoreWeave mentioned that it had opened 28 information facilities by the top of 2024, which incorporates the 2 new ones it formally introduced as we speak. Separately, it’s additionally planning 10 new information facilities in 2025, three of which might be in Europe, together with three beforehand introduced places in Norway, Sweden, and Spain.
