CoreWeave’s first international data centers are now in the UK

Koroevthe cloud computing company that provides businesses with artificial intelligence computing resources, has officially opened its first two data centers in the UK – the first outside its home market of the US.

CoreWeave It opened its European headquarters in London last Mayand announced plans to open two data centers as part of a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) investment in the United Kingdom. Today’s news coincides with Separate announcement from the UK Government It details a five-year investment plan to boost government-owned AI computing capacity, as well as geographic “AI growth zones” that include private-sector AI infrastructure.

“This investment is a major vote of confidence in the UK’s digital sector, and exactly the kind we want to see as we grow the economy and use AI to drive efficiency.” Rachel ReevesThe British Treasury Secretary said in a statement.

CoreWeave’s first data center in the UK quietly went online in Crawley in October, with a second center coming online in December in London Docklands, the company said. Uses both sites Nvidia Hopper GPUs (Graphical processing units), based on their upgrade H200 series of chips Designed specifically for HPC and AI workloads.

From cryptography to artificial intelligence computation

Founded in 2017, CoreWeave started out focusing on cryptocurrency mining, but as demand for AI computing increased — that is, the processing power and infrastructure required to perform computational tasks such as running algorithms and executing machine learning models — the company repurposed this GPU infrastructure. For these workloads.

CoreWeave is one of a number of cloud infrastructure startups looking to capitalize on the AI ​​hype, including homegrown European companies such as France FlexAI; DataCrunch, which is Based in Finland; Netherlands-based Nebius, which He rose from the ashes From the Russian internet giant Yandex.

CoreWeave said it has opened 28 data centers by the end of 2024, including the two new ones it officially announced today. Separately, it also plans to set up 10 new data centers in 2025, three of which will be in Europe, including Three locations previously announced In Norway, Sweden and Spain.