CoreWeave Raises $7.5 billion Debt from Blackstone, Others

CoreWeave Raises $7.5 billion Debt from Blackstone, Others
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CoreWeave Raises $7.5 billion Debt from Blackstone, Others

CoreWeave Raises $7.5 billion Debt from Blackstone, Others

Specialized cloud services provider CoreWeave is raising $7.5 billion in debt from financiers led by Blackstone and Magnetar to expand its infrastructure to meet rising artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, it said on Friday.

The deal is one of the largest debt financing rounds for a startup and adds firepower to CoreWeave's balance sheet as it looks to expand its cloud computing services to more customers, Reuters reported.

The Nvidia-backed company has raised more than $12 billion in equity and debt investments over the past 12 months, including a $1.1 billion series C investment led by private equity firm Coatue earlier this month.

"The caliber of investors in this large debt financing round is a powerful testament to ... the insatiable market appetite for AI infrastructure," CEO and co-founder Michael Intrator said in a statement.

Coatue, Carlyle, CDPQ, DigitalBridge Credit, funds managed by BlackRock, Eldridge Industries and Great Elm Capital Corp were also part of CoreWeave's latest debt raise.

CoreWeave has seen a boost from businesses rapidly adopting generative AI technology. It has partnerships with AI startups and competing cloud providers to build clusters to power AI workloads.



Sam Altman Says Meta Offered $100 Million Bonuses to OpenAI Employees 

The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 
The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 
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Sam Altman Says Meta Offered $100 Million Bonuses to OpenAI Employees 

The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 
The logo of Meta is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. (Reuters) 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta has offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them, as the tech giant seeks to ramp up its artificial intelligence strategy.

The alleged attempts by Meta to hire OpenAI staffers are the latest signs of a frenzy to hire top engineers to develop AI models, and they come at a time when the Facebook owner is working on building its superintelligence unit to catch up with competitors.

Competition for AI talent has reached a feverish pitch as superstar researchers are being courted like professional athletes on the belief that individual contributors can make or break companies.

"They (Meta) started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team," Altman said on the Uncapped podcast that aired on Tuesday, hosted by his brother. "You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year."

"At least, so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," Altman said.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours, and Reuters could not verify the information.

"I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor," Altman said.

His comments come just days after Meta invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling startup Scale AI, and hired its top boss, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new superintelligence team.

Meta, once recognized as a leader in open-source AI models, has suffered from staff departures and has postponed the launches of new open-source AI models that could rival competitors like Google, China's DeepSeek and OpenAI.