AI hyperscaler CoreWeave’s initial public offering was meant to serve as a litmus test for the industry. The firm went public on the stock market last week, becoming the first all-AI startup to have done so.
It’s hard to read the tea leaves over such a short period, but at first, it looked like the company — and industry, if CoreWeave is a bellwether — was in for rough times ahead. After opening at $39, slightly below its IPO price of $40, shares slid almost ten percent in just its second day of trading on Monday.
But on its third day today, the stock seemingly shook off the gloom and spiked over 20 percent before settling around 18 percent by midday.
It’s a significant change of course, bucking the narrative that the first tech IPO since 2021 was a catastrophe.
Still, reality bites. The AI cloud provider was hoping to go public at $47 per share, but downsized the offering over the days leading up to the IPO, raising concerns over a “disastrous” AI bubble.
As of midday Tuesday, CoreWeave’s shares are hovering around the $44 mark.
CoreWeave’s offering was the biggest tech IPO in four years, with inflation and rising interest rates disincentivizing investors from betting on riskier offerings until now, as CNBC reported earlier this week.
As such, it’s attracting outsize attention as the industry faces major losses. AI companies are still pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the buildout of data center infrastructure to support increasingly power-hungry AI models. A possible return on investment years down the line seems as tenuous as ever, with tech CEOs warning of slumping demand while the supply side surges ahead.
Trump’s escalating tariff war has also put a major damper on investor enthusiasm due to surging economic uncertainty.
However, CoreWeave’s rally today shows a much-needed glimmer of hope for the AI industry.
CoreWeave is tied up with a number of major players in the AI space, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia. But whether it will be able to keep the current momentum going and survive for long on the public stock market remains to be seen.
Especially following Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s emergence earlier this year, investors are growing wary of the enormous capital expenses. The firm’s highly efficient model, which was trained at a fraction of the cost of its competitors at OpenAI and Google, punched a $1 trillion hole in the tech sector last month, with spooked investors wondering whether they had grossly overpaid for conventional models.
Could CoreWeave’s latest rally be indicative of renewed optimism — or is it symptomatic of a highly volatile stock that could still fall victim to Trump’s highly unpredictable and self-defeating economic policymaking and growing market uncertainty?
Chances are the firm’s share price could still be in for a rollercoaster ride in the days ahead as investors try to make sense of what an entirely AI-centered industry being publicly traded on the stock market actually looks like.
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