CoreWeave, the Original Neocloud, Wants People to Stop Calling It That

CoreWeave Inc., the original neocloud, is tired of people categorizing it that way.

The term was coined a couple of years ago to refer to the new crop of cloud computing providers focused on the artificial intelligence market, a group led by CoreWeave. But now that the company offers a range of software — and its cloud serves non-tech customers such as Caterpillar Inc., Capital One Financial Corp., Nasdaq Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. — it doesn’t think the label applies anymore.

The neocloud name is “temporary and without a purpose,” Chen Goldberg, CoreWeave’s executive vice president of product and engineering, said in an interview. “You can only be new for a short time.”

CoreWeave is looking to further diversify its lineup with a new set of development tools called Forge. The products, announced at a company conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, aim to help clients train and improve their AI models. CoreWeave created Forge after the company found the process cumbersome when developing one of its own products, she said.

Forge attempts to more seamlessly connect parts of what Goldberg calls the “AI loop.” Right now, companies deploy a new model, test it and find that it’s not always great, she said. To improve, they’ll fine-tune or train the model some more, or switch to a different processor “and then of course you have to deploy it again and when you deploy, you don’t want to have any downtime on the system,” she said.

The new offering has a free 30-day trial and a Pro tier that starts at $60 a month. There’s also an enterprise version for more complex needs related to signing in or privacy. The MasterClass instruction site and graphics software maker Canva are already using the product.

CoreWeave, founded about a decade ago, gained fame as a computing provider to Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI — at a time when those companies were seeking additional access to Nvidia Corp.’s highly prized graphics processing units to develop AI models. The company said it now gets most of its business from customers who use its AI cloud products — as well as software services built on top of GPUs — rather than just GPU access.

Eighty-two percent of customers use three or more CoreWeave products, the company said. The Livingston, New Jersey-based firm has also made several acquisitions to add more software offerings, some of which will now be part of Forge.

CoreWeave is still focused on offering access to the latest Nvidia GPUs. That includes the new Vera Rubin chips, which CoreWeave is providing to AI coding startup Cognition AI Inc. The company said it’s also starting to offer Nvidia’s Vera central processing units — a more general-purpose chip — to the first batch of clients.