CoreWeave completes $650 million secondary share sale, welcomes Cisco as investor.

• Nvidia graphics processing unit cloud provider CoreWeave announced a $650 million secondary share sale, with Cisco and Pure Storage joining financial investors.
• Nearly $9 billion will be invested in data center capacity by the Nvidia-backed startup, Core Scientific, for bitcoin mining.
• CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion in May.

CoreWeave, a startup that leases out artificial intelligence chips to other businesses, announced on Wednesday that it completed a $650 million secondary share sale, with both and financial institutions participating.

CoreWeave's stakeholders are selling shares to outside investors in a transaction that aims for a $23 billion valuation, up from $19 billion in a May investment round.

CoreWeave is competing with major cloud infrastructure providers, including and , for Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) to support AI workloads. The startup received a significant boost last year with Nvidia's investment and was later appointed as a third-party cloud provider by .

There has been a surge in interest from investors in funding companies that develop generative AI technology, which can produce text, images, and videos based on minimal human input. This interest intensified following the popularity of Microsoft-supported OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022, resulting in a significant increase in demand for computational resources.

In July, CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Mike Intrator stated on CNBC's "Squawk Box" that his company is one of the few in the world capable of building the necessary infrastructure at the required scale to make a significant impact.

Nvidia announced that its H200 GPUs were made available through CoreWeave, marking the first cloud provider to achieve general availability with the graphics cards.

In October, CoreWeave announced a $650 million credit line, bringing its total funding to $14 billion, a spokesperson said.

A bitcoin mining company announced that CoreWeave had agreed to purchase 500 megawatts of data center capacity in a deal worth up to $8.7 billion over 12 years.

Investment firms such as Coatue and Fidelity, in addition to Cisco and Pure, participated in CoreWeave's secondary sale.

CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator states that the market demand for AI infrastructure is unyielding.