CoreWeave is going all in on Trump with 'CoreWeave Federal'
The Trump administration’s aggressive push to win the global AI race is potentially creating commercial opportunities across a broad range of sectors, from chip manufacturing to cloud companies to the energy industry and more.
But CoreWeave (CRWV) is now taking a different tack: Instead of only seeking out new commercial opportunities, the AI cloud provider is looking to capitalize on the growing demand for artificial intelligence solutions within the government sector.
The company announced this week that it will begin focusing on delivering secure and compliant high-performance AI cloud services to US government agencies, as well as their key partners.
These partners will include the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), which is the network of private companies that develop, produce, and maintain military weapons and systems for the U.S. government.
The government-focused work will be done through a program it’s calling CoreWeave Federal.
CoreWeave said that AI federal agencies are beginning to accelerate the adoption of their AI capabilities for training and inference, and it requires “the same speed, scale, and reliability that is driving innovation in the private sector.”
The company is seeking to support government agencies in building, training and deploying AI solutions at scale, allowing them to manage “the increasingly complex government workloads required to modernize and propel critical agency missions and national interests.”
CoreWeave noted that it is investing in the teams and technologies that are needed to meet the specific compliance demands of government agencies. This includes aligning its platform with the authorizations laid out in FedRAMP.
FedRAMP, or the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, is a U.S. government-wide program established in 2011 that requires that all federal agency cloud deployments use services that meet specific security requirements in order to protect federal information.
“America’s economic competitiveness and national security rely on the continued advancement of secure, high-performance AI infrastructure,” CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
“We will bring our platform to the federal market in alignment with the government’s rigorous standards to help agencies accelerate innovation and strengthen mission performance.”
CoreWeave’s stock has soared 249.6% since it went public in March.
The public sector is crowded with tech giants
CoreWeave said that it has been strengthening its “government-focused leadership bench” by recently adding people in positions dedicated to security, government affairs, legal and communications.
The US federal government began shifting its data storage away from in-house data centers and toward cloud-based services in 2009. The government made the transition in order to cut spending on information technology (IT) and to increase efficiencies within federal agencies.
But as CoreWeave seeks to pivot its commercial business to the public sector, it's already facing stiff competition to gain traction.
Amazon’s (AMZN) AWS launched its government-focused AWS GovCloud service in 2011, the same year that FedRAMP was established. The launch of FedRAMP essentially opened the door for commercial cloud companies to get certified and grab market share within the government.
Google (GOOG) received its FedRAMP authorization in 2018, allowing it to offer its cloud services to the US government.
AWS controls the largest share of the overall global cloud market at 30%, according to data from Statista. Google is third with 13% of the market.