MW CoreWeave and Anthropic make opposite money-raising moves as AI attracts billions

By Steve Gelsi

Nvidia-backed Coreweave files to go public, while Amazon-backed Athropic announces a private-market valuation of $61.5 billion

Nvidia Corp.-backed CoreWeave has filed its initial public offering, while Amazon.com-backed Anthropic raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion private-market valuation, as artificial intelligence continues to attract billions in investments.

The two companies are feeding into strong interest in AI from both public- and private-market investors with the latest in what are expected to be a series of large money moves in the business of creating sentient technology.

"AI is certainly the hottest space, full stop," said Michael Weisz, chief executive of YieldStreet, a financial technology company that helps individuals invest in private markets.

AI currently looms large among the 400 private-equity, venture-capital and growth-equity firms in YieldStreet's investing network, he said.

"There's an arms race to adopt AI at companies. Investors are paying attention, and they want to back the winners, big-time," Weisz told MarketWatch.

Nowadays, companies have the option to raise billions in private markets instead of going public, he said.

CoreWeave's business as a data-center provider likely offers the more predictable revenue stream desired by public-market investors, while a company such as Anthropic that is working on cutting-edge generative-AI programs may want to stay private longer, he said.

"Public shareholders can be unforgiving," Weisz said. "Staying private longer offers CEOs more flexibility."

CoreWeave plans to trade on the Nasdaq COMP under the symbol "CRWV," with underwriters Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Citigroup leading the deal.

The company, based in Livingston, N.J., specializes in software and cloud services that support AI. It reported $1.9 billion in 2024 revenue, with 737% revenue growth in the past year from its 32 data centers.

Nvidia Corp. $(NVDA)$ owns a roughly 6% stake in CoreWeave and supplies chips for its data centers. Magnetar Financial LLC owns a 34.5% stake in the company, and Fidelity Institutional Asset Management owns about 7.6%.

Anthropic, meanwhile, said Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, a unit of Salesforce Inc. $(CRM)$, all took part in its $3.5 billion private funding round.

"This will advance our development of AI systems, deepen our understanding of how they work, and fuel our international expansion," Anthropic said in a blog post.

Amazon.com $(AMZN)$ invested $4 billion in Anthropic one year ago. Anthropic has built Claude 2, a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

-Steve Gelsi

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March 04, 2025 12:50 ET (17:50 GMT)

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