CoreWeave and Leidos build classified AI cloud for US intelligence and defense agencies

CoreWeave & Leidos are building a classified AI cloud for US spies

CoreWeave, the AI-cloud company that rents GPUs to the biggest AI labs, is teaming up with the contractor Leidos to run its platform inside SCIF-accredited data centres for US intelligence and defence agencies. The constraint is not chips but clearance, and for CoreWeave the federal push helps diversify a commercial book concentrated in a handful of giant customers. The AI cloud is heading into the vault. CoreWeave rents high-end GPUs to the biggest AI labs. Now it wants to run that same cloud inside the sealed facilities where America keeps its secrets, with the contractor Leidos as its guide. The two companies announced the collaboration on Thursday. CoreWeave will place its AI platform inside Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, the sealed rooms known as SCIFs where classified intelligence is stored and analysed. Leidos will handle the parts a commercial cloud provider cannot: accreditation, secure architecture, cyber operations and mission integration. The customers are America's spy agencies and the Department of War, as the Pentagon is now styled. Both sides call it "sovereign" AI capacity. It is the same stack CoreWeave rents to commercial labs, rebuilt to the rules that classified work demands. What they plan to sell The two companies sketched out five things they intend to offer. There is a classified cloud for training and running models, plus tools to help analysts fuse intelligence, exploit imagery and reach decisions. The rest leans into security and simulation. There are cyber ranges to war-game AI attacks, plus synthetic data and digital twins for training. A final piece links the central cloud to disconnected, forward-deployed units in the field. Sachin Jain, CoreWeave's chief operating officer, said federal teams need "secure, scalable platforms" to put AI to work. He said the company wants to extend the tools it gives the world's top AI labs "to highly secure government environments." Why accreditation is the hard part The constraint here is not chips. It is clearance. A commercial AI cloud is built for the opposite of secrecy: huge shared regions, elastic capacity, customers reaching their clusters over the open internet. Classified work needs the reverse. The hardware has to sit in a facility cleared for the data, run by cleared staff and cut off from the public internet. Auditing and model governance come built in, not bolted on. That gap is why a government cannot simply rent a slice of an ordinary cloud region. It is also why an integrator like Leidos is in the deal at all. Leidos brings the scale for that work. It reported about $17.2bn in revenue last year and employs more than 50,000 people. "This is the next evolution of mission technology," said Jason O'Connor, president of Leidos Intelligence, describing "sovereign AI compute at scale, secure by design." Why CoreWeave needs the work For CoreWeave, federal money solves a specific problem: concentration. The company grew explosively by renting compute to a handful of giants. It reported $2.08bn in first-quarter revenue, up 112% on the year, against a backlog worth $99.4bn. Much of that rests on a few names, including a $21bn commitment from Meta and a multi-year deal with Anthropic. Selling to spies and soldiers spreads that risk. It also fits a wider push. CoreWeave launched a dedicated federal arm last year, aligning with FedRAMP and other government sign-offs. Rivals are chasing the same budgets. Those include military cyber startups and chipmakers handing supercomputers to the armed forces. Washington is also consolidating its software contracts, and the hunt for sovereign AI now stretches well beyond it, from Europe's own military-AI push onward. What is actually signed Not much yet. CoreWeave's own filing notes the arrangement depends on definitive agreements that are not yet signed. It says deployment will follow "mission requirements and federal appropriation priorities." In plain terms, this moves at the speed of Washington, not the speed of a commercial contract. The capacity is there to draw on. CoreWeave passed 1GW of active power in the first quarter and has contracted more than 3.5GW. Its chief executive, Michael Intrator, says it is heading toward more than 8GW by 2030. The classified slice will be tiny by comparison. It is limited less by megawatts than by where an accredited rack can legally sit.

Leidos and CoreWeave partner on AI cloud for defense agencies By Investing.com

RESTON, Va. & LIVINGSTON, N.J. - Leidos (NYSE:LDOS) and CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) announced today a collaboration to provide AI cloud services to the U.S. Intelligence Community and Department of Defense, according to a press release statement. The partnership combines Leidos' experience in government systems with CoreWeave's AI cloud platform to deliver secure, sovereign AI cloud services for federal agencies to build, train, deploy and operate AI applications. The companies plan to offer services within Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities-accredited data centers. CoreWeave will provide its AI-native cloud platform including infrastructure, networking, storage and orchestration for training and inference workloads. Leidos will lead mission integration, secure architecture accreditation support, cyber operations, data engineering and customer delivery for intelligence and defense programs. Planned features include classified AI cloud services for model training and deployment, AI-powered workflows for intelligence analysis, cyber simulation ranges, synthetic data generation and edge-to-cloud AI orchestration connecting centralized platforms with tactical environments. "Combining CoreWeave's AI cloud platform with our mission-grade federal integration accelerates delivery for IC and DoW priorities," said Jason O'Connor, president of Leidos Intelligence. "Federal teams need secure, scalable platforms to operationalize it," said Sachin Jain, chief operating officer at CoreWeave. "Through CoreWeave Federal and our collaboration with Leidos, we intend to extend those capabilities to highly secure government environments." The collaboration builds on CoreWeave Federal, the company's dedicated business for delivering AI cloud services to U.S. government agencies and the Defense Industrial Base. Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $17.2 billion for the fiscal year ended January 2, 2026. CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq in March 2025. The companies noted that forward-looking statements are subject to execution of definitive agreements, with no assurance such agreements will be finalized. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

Leidos Holdings, Inc. And CoreWeave, Inc. Collaborate To Accelerate Delivery Of AI Capabilities For Defense, National Security And Intelligence Missions

Leidos Holdings, Inc. and CoreWeave, Inc. responded to the rapidly growing need for secure artificial intelligence (AI) technology dedicated to the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of War?s (DoW) unique requirements. Leidos Holdings, Inc. and CoreWeave, Inc. are teaming up to provide secure, sovereign AI cloud services that can be used to help federal agencies build, train, deploy, and operate AI at mission scale. The collaboration combines Leidos Holdings, Inc.?s decades of experience delivering mission-critical systems for the U.S. government with CoreWeave, Inc.?s AI-native cloud platform trusted by leading AI builders. Together the two companies aim to help turn AI into an operational advantage for the United States. Leidos Holdings, Inc. and CoreWeave, Inc. intend to bring dedicated, sovereign AI cloud services to IC and DoW missions, built with the same technology stack used for the most advanced AI deployments, and adapt the capabilities to meet the unique security, classification, and operational requirements of national security organizations. Features envisioned include: Classified AI Cloud Services ? Secure environments for model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, and continuous monitoring. Intelligence Analyst Augmentation ? AI-powered workflows for fusing intel from multiple sources, imagery analysis and exploitation, and decision support among others. Cyber AI Ranges ? Cyber simulation, autonomous defense testing, threat modeling, vulnerability prioritization, and adversarial AI evaluation. Synthetic Data and Simulation ? Secure generation of mission-relevant data, digital twins, and simulation environments for training and operational planning. Edge-to-Cloud AI Orchestration ? Connect a centralized AI cloud platform with forward-deployed, disconnected, and tactical environments. Within Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF)-accredited data centers, CoreWeave, Inc. plans to offer its AI-native cloud platform including purpose-built infrastructure, advanced networking, AI-optimized storage, and cloud-native orchestration for training and inference workloads. Leidos Holdings, Inc. will lead mission integration, secure architecture accreditation support, cyber operations, data engineering, and customer delivery for intelligence and defense programs. Together, the companies expect to accelerate delivery of mission-applied AI capabilities aligned with the unique needs of national security, and provide potential solutions to unify fragmented AI infrastructure and architectures in multiple domains. The combined capabilities will be designed with federal security controls, auditability, model governance, data protection, and mission continuity as foundational requirements. Compute deployment and architecture will be determined by mission requirements and federal appropriation priorities. The collaboration builds on the recent launch of CoreWeave Federal, CoreWeave, Inc.?s dedicated business focused on delivering AI cloud services to U.S. government agencies and the Defense Industrial Base.