Few people had heard of Coreweave, One of the most interesting emerging companies in the United States. But maybe we should start at the beginning. There are turbulence between Openai and Microsoft. According to the news agency ReutersSam Altman’s company, creator of Chatgpt, would have signed a five -year contract and 11.9 billion dollars with Coreweavea company specialized in cloud computing services based on graphic (GPU) processors essential for the development of artificial intelligence. Coreweave It has Nvidia among its investors And it is expected that soon debut.
Sector experts interpret this operation as A clear sign of OpenAi’s will to reduce his Microsoft technological dependencethat until now provided most of the servers and the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate systems such as Chatgpt. This agency had placed Openai in a vulnerable position: any change in Microsoft policies or slowdown in the supply of computer resources could have hindered the innovation capacity of the Altman company.
According to Reuters, the agreement It expects Openai to receive shares worth $ 350 million as part of the future IPO of Coreweave. The actions will be transferred in a private placement close to the IPO.
The announcement, which took place on Monday, March 10, 2025, is even more significant if it is taken into account that Microsoft is currently the largest coreweave customergenerating 62% of its income from 2024, which grew to 1.9 billion dollars from 228.9 million of the previous year.
The technological battle
The tensions between Openai and Microsoft are nothing new, but now they seem to reach new dimensions. Although Microsoft invested more than 10,000 million dollars in Openai in January 2023, The relationship between both companies is increasingly characterized by competition. With this agreement, Microsoft had obtained exclusive rights to use OpenAI technologies, integrating their models into the Microsoft Azure cloud services and in their applications such as Word and Excel. In return, Openai had received vital resources for research and development: But this close collaboration also caused Openai to depend on Microsoft for the necessary infrastructure to train its models.
Already in January, Openai had taken a first step to Free yourself from the Microsoft ecosystem with the Stargate Agreement (In which great actors such as Softbank and Oracle participated) and that affected cloud management. Until then, the Altman company depended totally on Microsoft Azure for the training of its AI models.
On the other hand, however, Microsoft did not stop crossing. In fact, although it is true that Openai depends on Microsoft for the calculation power necessary to train its models, it is no less true than Microsoft uses Openai’s GPT-4 model to boost its star product of AI: Microsoft 365 Copilot. Therefore, the Redmond company is accelerating the development of its own technologies to challenge OpenAI in the field of large language models (LLM). The hiring of Mustafa Suleyman, former Deepmind co -founder And Altman’s old rival, to direct Microsoft’s division goes in this direction. The new team began to work immediately in the development of its own advanced artificial intelligence models, including THE NEW SERIES “MAI “, whose objective is to match the performance of the main models of Openai and Anthropic.
The GPU career is the key to the domain of AI
Coreweave It represents an object of strategic advantage in this challenge. The company operates 32 data centers with More than 250,000 NVIDIA GPU, key components to train and execute artificial intelligence models. Recently it has expanded its fleet with the new Nvidia Blackwell machines, designed to withstand even more advanced AI systems and capable of reasoning in a similar way to humans. For OpenAI, therefore, the agreement with Coreweave It is crucial. The GPUs have become the gold pattern of artificial intelligence: who controls the greatest number of them will have a competitive decisive advantage. Altman recently lamented in x From the available GPU scarcity, an existential problem for your company. With this agreement, Openai obtains privileged access to one of the largest world -calculation power reserves and even more Microsoft is emancipated. And not just that: with a participation in the capital of Coreweave, Openai can also influence the strategic decisions of the supplier.
Article originally published in Wired Italy. Adapted by Mauricio Serfatty Godoy.
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