CoreWeave's 2019 AI Pivot Finally Pays Off as Jane Street Drops $6B for GPU Power

CoreWeave has secured a massive $6 billion deal with quantitative trading firm Jane Street, which will use the AI cloud infrastructure company's compute power for its trading and research operations. Because nothing says "we're serious about alpha" quite like renting someone else's GPUs at scale. Under the agreement, CoreWeave will provide compute from multiple data center facilities. Jane Street also purchased $1 billion in CoreWeave Class A Common stock at $109 per share. That's one way to diversify the portfolio beyond complex derivatives and questionable sushi lunch decisions.

Shares of CoreWeave (CRWV) climbed about 1.5% on Wednesday, reaching approximately $119.04 at the time of publication. A modest victory lap, sure, but in this market, a green candle is a green candle. We'll take it.

The deal comes roughly one week after CoreWeave announced an agreement with Anthropic, where the AI developer would use CoreWeave's compute infrastructure to power its Claude large language models. Building on that momentum like a degen building on arugular.

CoreWeave was founded as a crypto mining company called Atlantic Crypto in 2017, before pivoting to AI cloud computing infrastructure in 2019. That's right – the same industry that brought you electricity bills you couldn't pay and ASICs that depreciated faster than a meme coin's market cap is now hosting the AI revolution. Sometimes the grid really does come full circle. That early pivot helped establish CoreWeave as a leading neocloud company, according to analysts from Bernstein.

Neocloud service providers are cloud computing companies built around GPUs, which power AI workloads. Traditional cloud providers rely on CPUs suitable for websites, web2 platforms, video games, and applications. It's basically the difference between renting a reliable sedan for your commute versus leasing a Formula 1 car to do burnout contests in your driveway – both get you somewhere, but one definitely attracts more attention at 2am.

Bernstein analysts compared CoreWeave with peers IREN and Nebius, concluding that CRWV has "by far the strongest commercial machine" thanks to a mix of contractual agreements and on-demand revenue, plus a diverse customer base. In plain English: they're not just betting on one horse, they're running a whole stable. Meanwhile, the rest of the neocloud space is out here hoping someone notices their DeFi summer tattoo.

"Nine of the top 10 AI model providers now leverage CoreWeave's platform," the company said following its Anthropic deal in April. Nine out of ten – the remaining one is probably still mining BTC on a laptop in a dorm room somewhere, and honestly, we respect the commitment.