CoreWeave shares surge 10% following multiyear Anthropic cloud deal

The competitive "AI chip crunch" has led OpenAI to partner with Broadcom for 10GW of custom chips, while Microsoft recently debuted its Maia 200 processor in January 2026.

The race for artificial intelligence supremacy has shifted from model development to infrastructure security. On Friday, April 10, 2026, CoreWeave, the AI-focused cloud provider that went public in 2025 announced a strategic agreement to power Anthropic's next generation of Claude models.

The deal validates CoreWeave's "specialized cloud" model as an alternative to hyperscalers, sending its stock to a daily high of $105.90 before settling at $102.00.

This partnership follows a massive week for the AI hardware sector. Just 24 hours prior, Meta committed an additional $21 billion to CoreWeave, bringing their total partnership value to roughly $35 billion. As the demand for compute remains insatiable, companies are diversifying their hardware stacks.

Anthropic now utilizes a blend of AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs via CoreWeave, while simultaneously working with Broadcom to develop the "multi-gigawatt" infrastructure necessary to keep pace with a revenue run-rate that has reportedly surpassed $30 billion.

The Issues

The primary challenge for the industry is the escalating cost of compute and the "gigawatt gap." AI firms must solve the problem of hardware dependency on Nvidia; hence the aggressive pivot toward custom silicon (OpenAI's 10GW Broadcom deal and Meta's MTIA 400). However, building custom chips is a multi-year endeavor, leaving a supply-demand mismatch in the interim. Furthermore, CoreWeave faces the challenge of financing its rapid expansion, having recently increased its convertible note offering to $3.5 billion to fund the construction of the 32 data centers required to fulfill its $66 billion contract backlog.

CoreWeave has positioned itself as the "essential utility" of the AI era. By locking in both Anthropic and Meta within a single week, it has consolidated a significant portion of the world's most valuable AI workloads, even as those giants move toward building their own custom processors.