Coreweave, the $19 billion cloud computing company that provides companies with AI compute resources, has formally opened its first two data centers in the U.K. — its first outside its domestic U.S. market.
CoreWeave opened its European headquarters in London last May, shortly after hitting a $19 billion valuation off the back of a $1.1. billion fundraise. At the same time, the company announced plans to open two data centers as part of a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) investment in the U.K. Today’s news coincides with a separate announcement from the U.K. government which details a five-year investment plan to bolster government-owned AI computing capacity, as well as geographic “AI Growth Zones” which includes AI infrastructure from the private sector.
“This investment is a huge vote of confidence in the U.K.’s digital technology sector, and is exactly the kind we want to see as we grow the economy and use AI to drive efficiency,” Rachel Reeves, U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a statement.
CoreWeave’s first U.K. data center quietly went live in Crawley back in October, the company said, with the second hub going operational in December in London Docklands. Both locations use Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs (graphical processing units), based on its upgraded H200 series of chips designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads.
From crypto to AI compute
Founded in 2017, CoreWeave started out with a focus on crypto mining, but with the surge in demand for AI compute — that is, the processing power and infrastructure required to carry out computational tasks such as running algorithms and executing machine learning models — the company repurposed this GPU infrastructure for such workloads.
CoreWeave is one of a number of cloud infrastructure startups looking to capitalize on the AI hype wave, including domestic European players such as France’s FlexAI; DataCrunch, which is based out of Finland; and Netherlands-based Nebius, which emerged from the ashes of Russian internet giant Yandex.
CoreWeave said that it had opened 28 data centers by the end of 2024, which includes the two new ones it officially announced today. Separately, it’s also planning 10 new data centers in 2025, three of which will be in Europe, including three previously announced locations in Norway, Sweden, and Spain.
