CoreWeave Lands Perplexity in New AI Cloud Deal, Stock Jumps 5.7% Pre-Market

Core View - CoreWeave has secured a multi-year partnership with Perplexity, an AI-powered search company, to run AI inference workloads on its cloud infrastructure, resulting in a 5.7% increase in CRWV shares during pre-market trading [1] Partnership Details - Under the agreement, Perplexity will utilize dedicated NVIDIA GB200 NVL72-powered clusters on CoreWeave's platform to support its growing AI products and the Sonar and Search API ecosystem [2] - CoreWeave will implement Perplexity Enterprise Max within its organization, enabling employees to conduct multi-step research, analyze data, and utilize advanced AI models on a unified platform [2] Deployment and Strategy - Perplexity has initiated the deployment of inference workloads using CoreWeave Kubernetes Service and is employing W&B Models for model training and management [3] - The collaboration emphasizes Perplexity's multi-cloud strategy and strengthens CoreWeave's role as a specialized infrastructure provider for AI companies [3] Market Demand and Company Position - CoreWeave's SVP of Revenue highlighted the increasing demand for infrastructure tailored for real-world AI deployment, emphasizing the need for high performance and reliability [4] - The partnership with Perplexity adds a fast-growing AI-native customer to CoreWeave's platform, which is crucial for diversifying its customer base beyond major clients like OpenAI and Meta [5] - CoreWeave reported a contracted revenue backlog of $66.8 billion, indicating long-term demand for AI infrastructure despite recent execution risks and customer concentration concerns [5]