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

CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) is adding another high-profile name to its customer roster. Perplexity, the AI-powered search company, has signed a multi-year partnership to run AI inference workloads on CoreWeave’s cloud infrastructure, with CRWV shares rising approximately 5.7% in pre-market trading on the news.

Under the agreement, Perplexity will power next-generation inference workloads on CoreWeave’s platform using dedicated NVIDIA GB200 NVL72-powered clusters. The infrastructure will support Perplexity’s rapidly growing AI products and its Sonar and Search API ecosystem. CoreWeave will also deploy Perplexity Enterprise Max across its own organization, allowing employees to search the web and internal knowledge, conduct multi-step research, analyze data, and work with advanced AI models within a unified platform.

Perplexity has already begun running inference workloads using CoreWeave Kubernetes Service as part of the initial phase of deployment and is leveraging W&B Models to train, fine-tune, and manage models from experimentation to production. The collaboration highlights Perplexity’s multi-cloud strategy while reinforcing CoreWeave’s position as a specialized infrastructure provider for AI companies operating production-scale systems.

CoreWeave SVP of Revenue Max Hjelm said the partnership reflects the growing demand for infrastructure designed specifically for real-world AI deployment. “AI applications running in production require more than just access to raw infrastructure – they require best-in-class performance and reliability as well as a cloud platform designed end-to-end for AI that simplifies compute operations,” he said. Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko added that CoreWeave’s technical capabilities and partner-focused approach make it an “essential partner” as the company scales the infrastructure supporting its AI products.

CoreWeave shares have fallen sharply in recent sessions following its latest earnings report, which included a weaker-than-expected outlook and widening losses despite strong revenue growth. The company reported a contracted revenue backlog of $66.8 billion, underscoring long-term demand for AI infrastructure even as investors continue to focus on execution risks and customer concentration.

The Perplexity partnership adds another fast-growing AI-native customer to CoreWeave’s platform as the company works to broaden its customer base beyond its largest anchor clients. Those relationships include major commitments from companies such as OpenAI and Meta, which together account for tens of billions of dollars in contracted infrastructure demand. The new deal signals that CoreWeave’s specialized AI cloud infrastructure is gaining traction with emerging AI platforms building large-scale production systems.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction), whose GB200 Blackwell-based hardware powers the clusters referenced in the deal, remains a central supplier to CoreWeave’s infrastructure buildout as demand for high-performance AI compute continues to expand across both training and inference workloads.