By Jaspreet Singh
April 9 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms is deepening its CoreWeave partnership with a fresh $21 billion deal for additional cloud computing capacity, as it rushes to catch up with rivals in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race after an underwhelming AI model release last year.
The latest deal, which extends through December 2032, is in addition to a similar $14.2 billion agreement signed in September, the company said on Thursday.
Meta shares were up 2.4% in morning trading, while
those of CoreWeave were down 3.4%.
Meta has been rapidly expanding compute capacity to power the development and deployment of its large language models, benefiting companies such as CoreWeave, which provides clients with hardware and cloud resources.
Close Nvidia ties have made CoreWeave a key supplier of the specialized AI chips that large tech companies are scrambling to secure.
Thursday's deal gives Meta access to initial deployments of Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are twice as fast as the current generation Blackwell platform.
"This is another example that leading companies are choosing CoreWeave's AI cloud to run their most demanding workloads," CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
The Facebook-parent plans to spend up to $135 billion on its AI buildout this year, as Silicon Valley ramps up its costly pursuit of artificial general intelligence, a theoretical milestone where machines could match human cognitive performance.
The social media company on Wednesday unveiled Muse Spark, the first AI model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, an expensive team it assembled last year after the poor performance of its Llama 4 model.
CoreWeave and Meta have been partners since 2023. While Microsoft accounted for about 67% of CoreWeave revenue last year, Meta is now among its largest customers, CoreWeave said.
In a separate regulatory filing on Thursday, CoreWeave said it plans to sell bonds worth $1.25 billion and convertible bonds worth $3 billion.
The neocloud company said in February it will spend as much as $35 billion in capital expenditure this year, up from $14.9 billion in 2025.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Jonathan Ananda)
