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CoreWeave pricing its IPO well below the expected range in a blow for the AI-related IPO market. The AI infrastructure company sold 37 and a half million shares priced at $40 a piece each for a valuation of $20 billion. Now, CoreWeave was initially eyeing a range of $47 to $55 a share. CoreWeave is backed by Nvidia, which is expected to spend $250 million on the company's IPO. CoreWeave will start trading on the NASDAQ today. Stay tuned to Yahoo Finance because we'll be speaking with Brandon B, who is the CoreWeave's co-founder in the 11:00 a.m. hour here and Chief Development Officer, I might add. Uh noteworthy on this IPO, of course, is just the backdrop here that we've seen. And even as you look through some of the expectations for what 2025's IPO market could look like, Deloitte was out early with their expectations saying, "We're going to go from freeze, which is what we saw in 2024 to a partial thaw here in 2025 is what they're expecting and anticipating.

It's going to be a big day for determining how the rest of the year might go. I guess so goes CoreWeave, so goes the year is the theme of the day when it comes to IPOs. But just to give our viewers a little bit of context on the company here, one of the things that's fascinating about them is the amount of CAPEX at the company here. They spent four times its revenue on CAPEX last year, managed only a fraction of what bigger companies spend in the AI space. Of course, but when you're IPOing, you typically try to have a little bit more of a cap on your spending, though if you're big tech company, perhaps that bar is a little bit lower here. Uh, they had 15.1 billion in remaining performance obligations and $8 billion in debt on their balance sheet at the moment. Uh and just taking a look here at their cash burn, burning $6 billion of cash last year, $1.1 billion the prior year, but price of AI.

IPOs near and dear to my heart. It's a it's a division I used to work in when I was at NASDAQ stock market. And so still have a lot of uh friends, colleagues that still work over there. And there are a few things that they tend to look for when you have deals like this coming to the public markets because it could set the tone for the rest of the year as well. We even recently as last week spoke with the Discord co-founder and CEO, um uh Jason Citron, uh who essentially broke down what they were experiencing. And like a lot of companies who are just trying to figure out what the market is looking like, not just the market for their business, but more broadly, the market that they're entering into, what the volatility looks like. We've seen the VIX for most of the year above 20. And so we've just recently kind of settled below that psychological level and been uh in that ballpark. But what the VIX is doing and the economy being buoyant as well is another thing that Deloitte is looking for. And then just additionally here, just the cost of capital at this juncture too. That's something that Deloitte had also noted. The cost of capital is off its post-inflation peak, but most importantly, 2025 follows a year where the IPO market yielded a positive return. Get this for the first time since 2020.

Yeah.

So this is going to be the first big test, too.

And that was a big year for IPOs. That's really interesting to hear your context though, um in terms of the first IPO actually really mattering and the considerations on that for the year.

Especially of the AI front.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is a big one for investors. We'll have special coverage for you here on Yahoo Finance throughout the day.