CoreWeave has secured a contract worth up to $11.9 billion to provide dedicated compute capacity for OpenAI's model training and services, the company announced on March 10, 20251.
As part of the agreement, OpenAI will take an equity stake in CoreWeave through the issuance of $350.0 million of CoreWeave stock. The deal expands OpenAI's compute capacity for training and delivering its models at scale to hundreds of millions of users.
Michael Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, framed the contract as validation of the company's infrastructure capabilities. "Partnering with OpenAI on this net new contract underscores CoreWeave's proven ability to deliver reliable and performant infrastructure services, powering AI Innovations for world-leading AI labs," Intrator said.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, described CoreWeave as "an important addition to OpenAI's infrastructure portfolio, complementing our commercial deals with Microsoft and Oracle, and our joint venture with Softbank on Stargate". "Advanced AI systems require reliable compute, and we're excited to continue scaling with CoreWeave so we can train even more powerful models and offer great services to even more users," Altman said.
CoreWeave, established in 2017, operates a cloud platform designed specifically for compute-intensive workloads. The company completed its public listing on Nasdaq under the ticker CRWV in March 2025.
ANALYSIS The deal's structure ties OpenAI to CoreWeave as both customer and investor, creating a financial relationship that extends beyond a standard infrastructure procurement. Altman's explicit mention of Microsoft, Oracle, and the SoftBank-backed Stargate joint venture positions CoreWeave as a fourth pillar in OpenAI's compute supply chain, diversifying the lab's dependency across multiple providers.
At up to $11.9 billion in contract value, the agreement represents one of the largest disclosed AI infrastructure commitments between a model developer and a cloud provider. The "up to" qualifier indicates the total is a ceiling rather than a guaranteed spend, likely tied to usage thresholds or option periods.