Less than a week after its IPO, CoreWeave is already a polarizing stock. The co-founder explains what investors may be missing.

It’s easy to interpret CoreWeave’s lackluster IPO and muted first day of trading on Friday as bad news for the entire AI boom. But, as I’ll explain in a moment, that’s likely a mistake: many of CoreWeave’s problems are unique to CoreWeave.

CoreWeave reduced the size of its US initial public offering (IPO) and priced its shares below the indicated range, signaling a cautious investor sentiment despite the AI boom. The Nvidia-backed company now plans to sell 37.

CoreWeave's explosive growth driven by AI contracts, robust economics, and IPO proceeds. Read here for our bullish thesis on CRWV stock.

CoreWeave is one of a new breed of cloud providers that focuses on GPU-based server infrastructure and services to support the development and training of AI models. It claims to have more than 250,000 GPUs online, spread across 32 datacenters, mostly located in the US.

CoreWeave's IPO priced lower than expected, at $40 per share, raising $1.5B and valuing it at $19B - SiliconANGLE

The cloud computing company will likely seek a valuation closer to the $23 billion valuation it had in the private market a year ago than the roughly $30 billion it had originally targeted, people familiar with the matter said.

A cloud computing provider specializing in GPU-accelerated AI infrastructure, CoreWeave saw tepid demand for its highly publicized IPO underscoring the notion that timing is critical in the IPO market. But the broader message has implications for AI giants like Microsoft and NVIDIA.

AI cloud firm CoreWeave's first day on public markets was a dud, but experts warn against drawing conclusion about the health of the AI and data center sectors.