By Adam Levine

After launching a failed bid last year, artificial-intelligence darling CoreWeave is once again trying to acquire a supplier, Core Scientific, according to The Wall Street Journal .

Core Scientific shares are up 33% in midday trading on Thursday after the news broke. Until today, it badly lagged behind the broader market, with the stock down 12% on the year versus the S&P 500 index up 4%.

Both companies have taken a similar path to the business of renting out AI servers in the cloud -- they began as data centers for cryptocurrency mining. CoreWeave pivoted to AI data centers after the 2018 crypto crash, and has seen tremendous growth in revenue from $16 million in 2022 to $1.9 billion in 2024.

Since it went public in March, CoreWeave stock is up 299% through Wednesday's close. Its shares are down 1% in Thursday trading.

Now Core Scientific is also pivoting to AI. With AI cloud in short supply, CoreWeave turned to Core Scientific a year ago to help it add more capacity quickly. In 2025, CoreWeave's logic is still the same: more AI servers to rent out in the cloud, where demand still exceeds supply.

CoreWeave is a unique company. It is an AI pure-play, only renting out Nvidia AI servers in the cloud. Nvidia is a supplier, a customer, and owns 7% of CoreWeave's shares. For the moment, CoreWeave's revenue is heavily dependent on Microsoft's business, which supplied 72% of sales in the first quarter. CoreWeave has new deals with Google and OpenAI that should bring that number down and keep revenue growing quickly.

Now CoreWeave needs to add capacity quickly to meet the needs of those new customers, and it is hoping the acquisition will jump-start that.

Neither CoreWeave or Core Scientific responded immediately to a Barron's request to confirm the talks.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com

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June 26, 2025 15:35 ET (19:35 GMT)

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