The CoreWeave $26B valuation is scaled back from initial expectations. (0:15) Existing home sales surprise. (2:47) Accenture warns about DOGE contract impact. (3:45) Show NotesNearly all the AI valuation premium is goneEpisode transcripts: seekingalpha.com/wsb Sign up for our daily newsletter here and for full access to analyst ratings, stock quant scores, dividend grades, subscribe to Seeking Alpha Premium at seekingalpha.com/subscriptions.
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Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis. Good afternoon. Today is Thursday, March 20th, and I'm your host, Kim Kahn. Our top story so far. CoreWeave, a hyperscaler startup backed by NVIDIA, is targeting a valuation of around $26 billion with its IPO.
The company will sell 49 million shares, with 47,178,660 shares of Class A common stock being offered by CoreWeave and the balance by existing stockholders. The initial price range is between $47 and $55 per share. The deal would raise $2.7 billion at the top end. Corweave has applied to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol CRWV.
Including options and shares that will become available after the IPO, the valuation could rise to $32 billion, according to the FT. That's a scaling back of earlier expectations for a valuation of around $35 billion and a deal that would raise about $4 billion. Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs are acting as joint lead book runners.
The cloud services provider incurred a net loss of $863 million on $1.9 billion in revenue last year. Its platform powers top AI labs and enterprises like Cohere, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Nvidia. Microsoft accounted for 62% of its revenue in 2024, up from 35% the year prior.
Earlier this month, CoreWeave signed an $11.9 billion five-year contract to deliver AI infrastructure with OpenAI. Also on the NVIDIA front, Morgan Stanley said it was more positive on the company's trajectory after it held an analyst question-and-answer session at its GTC event.
Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Morris said management's enthusiasm at this stage of Blackwell was notable, given that it comes at a time when the market appears to be losing confidence.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during the keynote address that four major cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud, have already purchased 3.6 million Blackwell GPUs in 2025 compared to 1.3 million Hopper GPUs in 2024.
Moore said, during the Q&A session, it was clear that the reason the company made the decision to give that data was to refocus the narrative on the strength of the demand profile, as they continue to feel questions related to OpenAI-related spending shifting from one of the four to another of the four, or the pressure of ASICs which come from the four customers.
Looking to the economy, the Conference Board's U.S. Leading Indicator Index dipped 0.3% to 101.1 in February, slightly steeper than the 0.2% consensus and 0.2% decline prior, revised from down 0.3%. And existing home sales rose 4.2% month-on-month to a 4.26 million seasonally adjusted annual rate in February, compared with the 3.95 million consensus and 4.09 million in the prior.
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