CoreWeave reveals stake in Applied Digital, adding another brick to Nvidia’s “House of GPUs”
Applied Digital is up big on the news; CoreWeave, the opposite.
Applied Digital is surging after CoreWeave, the hottest IPO since sliced bread, revealed a 5.5% stake in the data center upstart, which would make it the fifth-largest owner according to publicly available filings.
Who else owns Applied Digital? Nvidia, now the seventh-largest holder with a 3.4% stake as of the end of Q1. And Nvidia, of course, also owns a big chunk of CoreWeave (nearly 7%), which has so far been an immensely profitable position to hold.
The connections between these companies can loosely be depicted as such:
One might think of an ouroboros of sorts (the snake eating itself), or one reader suggested this handy alternative:
Financial Wasserfall FTW
— clueneeder.bsky.social (@clueneeder.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 6:47 PM
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What’s the purpose behind all this? Well, something that immediately springs to mind is that by accelerating the deployment of CoreWeave and Applied Digital’s capabilities by providing access to equipment and capital, Nvidia is doing its best to ensure that all the possible near-term demand for AI that can be met is met through Nvidia, one way or another.
CoreWeave provides effectively “surge access” to Nvidia’s GPUs, and signed a deal with Applied Digital earlier this week to lease data center IT load, which analysts noted could help the firm realize its ginormous $25.9 billion order backlog more expeditiously.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has emphasized his desire for the company to be “the platform that wins” in AI, most recently with respect to access to China, but that’s a sentiment that holds true for the private sector at large, as well.
“In the end, the platform that wins the AI developers wins AI,” he said on the company’s most recent earnings call.
CoreWeave is down a ton today. I would be extremely reluctant to attribute CoreWeave’s decline to literally anything; the stock has been going parabolic, sometimes on no news, sometimes on news seemingly from a day ago. High-vol assets can cut both ways! As of yesterday’s close, the recently IPO’d company was up more than 350% from its April 21 closing low.
