CoreWeave to open two UK data centers as part of £1B investment

CoreWeave Inc., the operator of a cloud platform optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, today announced plans to open two data centers in the U.K.

The facilities will be built as part of an investment worth £1 billion, or about $1.25 billion. The initiative is also set to see CoreWeave open a new office in London that will function as its European headquarters. The company reportedly plans to employ about 30 workers at the hub who will focus on software engineering, support engineering, business operations, finance and go-to-market activities.

“We are seeing unprecedented demand for AI infrastructure and London is an important AI hub that we are investing in,” said CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mike Intrator. “Expanding our physical footprint in the U.K. is an important milestone in the next phase of CoreWeave’s growth.

CoreWeave’s U.K. investment comes less than two weeks after it announced the completion of a $1.1 billion funding round. At the time, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company raised the capital to help finance the construction of data centers in international markets. At the end of 2023, CoreWeave’s data center network consisted of 14 facilities in the U.S.

Enterprise-grade graphics cards of the kind available in CoreWeave’s cloud platform generate significantly more heat than central processing units. As a result, traditional air-based cooling equipment often struggles to keep up. Data center operators are increasingly opting to cool their GPU servers with liquid refrigerants, which conduct heat better than air.

CoreWeave recently detailed that its facilities likewise dissipate heat using a liquid-powered system. The system can use not only water but also other liquids to keep GPUs cool. According to CoreWeave, specialized software tracks which GPUs are most active and optimizes the attached heat dissipation equipment accordingly.

The company uses Kubernetes to deploy customer workloads on its infrastructure. It also leverages Slurm, another open-source tool for managing applications’ hardware usage. Kubernetes is mainly geared toward applications that run for an extended period of time, while Slurm is optimized to power relatively short-term workloads such as one-time AI training sessions.

CoreWeave has developed a custom implementation of the two tools for its public cloud. SUNK, as the software is known, allows Slurm to run on Kubernetes. CoreWeave says that combining the two tools helped improve the efficiency of its infrastructure.

It’s possible some of the technologies the company developed for its stateside data centers will find their way into its newly announced U.K. facilities. After the latter data centers come online, CoreWeave intends to further expand its local infrastructure footprint. The company plans to increase the total number of facilities in its data center network to 28 by year’s end. 

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