AI firm CoreWeave denies contract cancellations with Microsoft

(Reuters) -IPO-bound AI cloud startup CoreWeave said on Thursday it had not seen any contract cancellations after the Financial Times reported that the company's largest customer, Microsoft, had moved away from some agreements.

"We pride ourselves in our client partnerships and there have been no contract cancellations or walking away from commitments. Any claim to the contrary is false and misleading," a CoreWeave spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement.

The FT reported, citing sources, that Microsoft withdrew from some of its agreements with CoreWeave over delivery issues and missed deadlines. However, the report also said that Microsoft retained a number of ongoing contracts with CoreWeave and it remained an important partner.

Microsoft declined to comment on the report.

The agreement with Microsoft accounted for 62% of CoreWeave's revenue, or $1.2 billion in total, in 2024, according to a company filing.

The startup had warned that any negative changes in demand from Microsoft or a shift in the company's relationship with Microsoft would adversely affect its business.

Founded in 2017, Nvidia-backed CoreWeave provides access to data centers and high-powered chips for AI workloads and competes against cloud providers such as Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS.

CoreWeave has been laying the groundwork for a New York flotation at a valuation of over $35 billion, in what could be one of the biggest IPOs in recent times. It is also likely targeting to raise over $3 billion from its share sale, Reuters previously reported.

(Reporting by Angela Christy and Janaki Venugopalan in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Ojasvi Gupta; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala, Shailesh Kuber and Alan Barona)