CoreWeave Abandons Core Scientific for AI Notebook Marimo

Core Scientific shareholders voted against a $9 billion all-stock acquisition offer from partner and competitor CoreWeave in a Thursday vote.

This decision followed a recommendation to reject the deal from their largest shareholder, Sina Toussi of Two Seas Capital, a firm specializing in post-bankruptcy investments. Core Scientific itself emerged from bankruptcy in January 2024.

Both companies share a common origin in cryptocurrency mining. Core Scientific began as and remains a crypto miner, while AI data center provider CoreWeave also launched as a mining operation.

However, with support from investor and partner Nvidia, CoreWeave has successfully pivoted to handling AI workloads. Its stock has surged from a $14 billion market cap at its IPO to approximately $66 billion today, reflecting investor enthusiasm for AI. The company has been using its high-valued stock for acquisitions.

Despite securing a $10 billion, 12-year contract with Core Scientific to utilize its facilities for AI services, CoreWeave also pursued an outright purchase of the company, offering a premium over Core Scientific's share price at the time.

Investor Toussi, however, believes Core Scientific can replicate CoreWeave's success independently. "Since the deal was announced in July, AI infrastructure investment has accelerated, pushing the valuations of Core Scientific's peers even higher," he argued in his opposition letter. "Why would anyone accept a deal valued at just $16.40 per share?"

Following the shareholder rejection, CoreWeave withdrew its offer. Core Scientific's stock price increased on the news, elevating the company's market capitalization to $6.6 billion.

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The rejection of acquisition offers in favor of potentially larger future deals is another indicator that the market is experiencing—or approaching—an AI investment bubble.

Meanwhile, CoreWeave continues its acquisition strategy. On the same Thursday, it acquired Marimo, an open-source competitor to Jupyter Notebook, for an undisclosed amount. PitchBook estimates Marimo had raised roughly $5 million.

Python notebooks are development tools that integrate code, multimedia, and explanatory text into a single, collaborative file. Widely used for interactive data analysis and AI application development, this acquisition supports CoreWeave's strategy to expand from infrastructure hosting into the AI application development layer.