CoreWeave opens two data centers in the UK as part of £1bn investment

CoreWeave Inc., which operates a cloud platform optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, today announced plans to open two data centers in the UK.

The facilities will be built as part of an investment worth £1 billion (approximately $1.25 billion). The initiative will also see CoreWeave open a new office in London to serve as its European headquarters. The company will reportedly employ approximately 30 people at the hub, focusing on software engineering, support engineering, business operations, finance, and go-to-market activities.

“We are seeing unprecedented demand for AI infrastructure, and London is a key AI hub in which we are investing,” said Mike Intrater, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave. “Expanding our physical footprint in the UK is an important milestone in the next phase of CoreWeave’s growth.

CoreWeave’s UK 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 had raised 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 United States.

Enterprise-grade graphics cards, of the type available on CoreWeave’s cloud platform, generate significantly more heat than central processing units. As a result, traditional air cooling equipment is often difficult to cope with. Data center operators are increasingly choosing to cool GPU servers using liquid refrigerants, which conduct heat better than air.

CoreWeave recently detailed that its facility uses a liquid power system to similarly dissipate heat. This system can use water as well as other liquids to cool the GPU. According to CoreWeave, dedicated software tracks which GPUs are most active and optimizes the included heat dissipation equipment accordingly.

The company uses Kubernetes to deploy customer workloads onto its infrastructure. It also leverages Slurm, another open source tool for managing application hardware usage. Kubernetes is primarily aimed at long-running applications, while Slurm is optimized for powering relatively short-lived workloads, such as his one-time AI training sessions.

CoreWeave is developed Custom implementation of two tools for public cloud. SUNK allows Slurm, as the software is known, to run on top of Kubernetes. CoreWeave says the combination of the two tools has improved the efficiency of its infrastructure.

Some of the technology the company has developed for data centers in the state could be deployed at the newly announced UK facility. Once the latter data center is operational, CoreWeave plans 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 the end of the year.

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