Shares of CoreWeave, the first artificial intelligence startup to be published, have concluded the first day of trading at $40.01 per share.
The company's stock price, trading under the ticker symbol CRWV, shows concerns among Wall Street investors about the economy and CoreWeave's business model.
A weak day of trading came amidst the uncertainty over sluggish stock markets and inflation and President Trump's tariffs. The S&P 500 fell 2% on Friday. This was one of the worst days since Trump's election.
Listing cut prices – CoreWeave had estimated the range of $47 to $55 in its previous filing, but compared to a month ago, it already reflects skepticism from investors. The company's deal opened at $39 per share on Friday, even after CoreWeave reduced the size and value of its IPO
CoreWeave, a data center supporting Power Giant AI Systems, has also raised an offer of just $1.5 billion compared to the $4 billion analysts had anticipated.
In an interview Friday, CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said concerns about the stock market and AI industry have cut the list to the company, but the timing of its offering will benefit the company in the long run.
“It's just a day. I'll get through this day and keep moving,” Intrator said. “It's important for us to enter the open market.”
It is unclear whether the stock's performance will mark the start of the IPO parade that some investors have been hoping for. Among the companies watching Coreweave's public debut on Friday were online lending service Klarna and ticketing company StubHub, which is predicting the public list this year.
“This is not an easy IPO market,” said Samuel Kerr, head equity capital market analyst at financial insights firm Mergermarket. “The USIPO market shows that CoreWeave is probably not as strong as we thought it would be early this year.”
A more ideal time would have been at the end of last year for CoreWeave's public list after Trump was elected, before the release of a new chatbot by Chinese AI company Deepseek, Kerr added.
Nvidia, a supplier of CoreWeave's computer chips and one of its major investors, has not helped its share price fell 9% since Wednesday last week.
Some analysts are skeptical of CoreWeave's substantial debt, and have been taken over to build more data centers, a large facility that houses AI chips. The company's revenue rose from $1.9 billion from $229 million a year last year, but lost $863 million after spending nearly $1 billion to fund its debt.
“The very high debt profile is something IPO investors disliked for quite some time,” Kerr said.
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 as a cryptocurrency mining startup, but after Openai released its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, it shifted to using powerful NVIDIA chips for AI development.
Some of CoreWeave's customers include Microsoft, which accounted for a large portion of last year's revenue, and Openai, which announced nearly $12 billion in deals with CoreWeave in the weeks leading up to its IPO.
