Shares of specialized cloud infrastructure provider CoreWeave rose sharply, gaining nearly 7% in premarket and regular trading on Wednesday, following the announcement of a significant multi-year partnership with AI search company Perplexity AI.
The agreement designates CoreWeave as a backend cloud partner to run Perplexity's AI inference workloads on dedicated NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 GPU clusters. This infrastructure will specifically support the scaling of Perplexity's Sonar and Search API products as the company expands its AI-driven search services. Perplexity has already begun deploying initial workloads through CoreWeave's Kubernetes service as part of a broader multi-cloud strategy.
Max Hjelm, CoreWeave's senior vice president of revenue, emphasized the requirements for modern AI deployments, stating, "AI applications running in production require more than raw infrastructure and demand performance, reliability, and a cloud platform designed for AI." He added that CoreWeave's platform is engineered to simplify compute operations for developers building production-scale AI systems.
Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, highlighted CoreWeave's technical expertise as a key factor in the partnership decision, noting it would help accelerate infrastructure efficiency and product development. The partnership is reciprocal; CoreWeave will also adopt Perplexity Enterprise Max internally to provide its employees with AI-powered research tools.
This deal strengthens CoreWeave's position in the competitive AI cloud infrastructure market, adding a high-growth client to its roster, which already includes major commitments from firms like OpenAI and Meta Platforms. The company reported a contracted revenue backlog of $66.8 billion in its latest earnings, underscoring the sustained demand for specialized AI compute capacity.
