Nvidia-backed CoreWeave plans to downsize US IPO, source says

CoreWeave plans to reduce the size of its U.S. initial public offering and price the shares below range, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday. The Nvidia -backed cloud services provider is now looking to sell 37.5 million shares and price them below the range at $40 apiece, the source added, requesting anonymity discussing confidential information. The sale would fetch up to $1.5 billion.The listing is being closely watched as a test for the fragile U.S. IPO market and a gauge of whether investor enthusiasm for AI newcomers remains strong or is waning.CoreWeave and some existing investors had initially aimed to sell 49 million shares in the offering priced between $47 and $55 each to raise as much as $2.7 billion. The company did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment. Despite the AI boom, there are growing concerns that data center spending will be uneven, with investments concentrated among a few giants while others struggle to keep pace.DeepSeek, China's low-cost AI rival, has also emerged as a growing threat, fueling concerns about pressure on data center spending. Nvidia will anchor the CoreWeave IPO at the price, a source close to the matter told Reuters. The downsizing was first reported by Semafor on Thursday. CoreWeave, founded in 2017 as a crypto miner, had initially planned to raise over $3 billion in its share sale at a valuation topping $35 billion, sources told Reuters in November. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters of the IPO. CoreWeave aims to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "CRWV."