CoreWeave Launches First International Data Centers in UK, Boosting AI Infrastructure

CoreWeave opens a pair of H200 packed datacenters in UK

Rent-a-GPU outfit's latest datacenters are packed to the brim with H200s As the UK government reaffirms its aspirations to become an AI superpower, CoreWeave says two new GPU bit barns packed to the brim with Nvidia accelerators are ready for business. Located in Crawley and the London Docklands and developed in collaboration with colocation providers Digital Realty and Global Switch, respectively, the two sites are part of a £1 billion($1.2 billion USD) investment by the New Jersey-based datacenter operator. "The UK is an important market for CoreWeave, with our European headquarters here and further operational plans for the country," Mike Mattacola, chief business officer at CoreWeave, said in a canned statement. "We are pleased to be partnering with Digital Realty and Global Switch to deliver the next generation of AI infrastructure in the UK." But before anyone gets too excited, these sites aren't outfitted with Nvidia's latest and greatest Blackwell chips. Those parts only began making their way to market in Q4 2024. Instead, the facilities are using accelerators based on Nvidia's older Hopper architecture, which first made its debut in late 2022. CoreWeave opted for Nvidia's H200 and 400 Gb/s Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. Introduced in 2023, the H200 is among Nvidia's most advanced GPUs of the Hopper generation, with up to 141 GB of speedy HBM3e memory good for 4.8 TB/s of memory bandwidth and nearly 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP8 performance apiece. However, with more than a terabyte of high bandwidth memory -- eight GPUs -- per server, CoreWeave's UK datacenters should be better equipped to support ever growing frontier models, which have stretched existing systems to their limits. For instance, a single H200 system is now able to run Meta's largest model Llama 3.1 405B at full 16-bit resolution. Previously, the model would have had to be distributed across two nodes or quantized to 8-bits to run on an H100-based system. Just how many of these GPUs are housed at the Crawley and London Docklands sites hasn't been disclosed. The Register reached out to CoreWeave for comment; we'll let you know if we can get any specifics. However, past deployments have typically involved clusters of 10,000 or more accelerators. The two datacenters are the last in a string of large-scale deployments over the past two years and reflect CoreWeave's ambition to break into new markets. Last spring, CoreWeave expanded its operations across the pond, announcing London as the location of its European headquarters alongside an initial investment of £1 billion. In October, during the International Investment Summit, CoreWeave inflated that investment to £1.75 billion ($2.1 billion USD). These efforts have been supported by a flood of venture capital and debt financing totaling billions of dollars amid the AI boom. CoreWeave currently operates 28 datacenters around the globe with plans to bring 10 additional bit barns on line by the end of 2025. While the datacenter builder is breaking into the UK and European markets, the British government is doubling down on its efforts to establish itself as an AI superpower. On Monday, the nation outlined the AI Opportunities Action Plan, which will see the government adopt 50 recommendations made by a venture capitalist to use AI to boost productivity by 1.5 percent a year. The economic impact of the strategy is expected to generate £47 billion ($57 billion) a year. Aspirations aside, supporting the additional AI infrastructure necessary to see these plans to fruition may prove troublesome for the UK's National Grid, as its CEO has previously warned. ®

CoreWeave's first international data centers are now live in the UK | TechCrunch

Coreweave, the $19 billion cloud computing company that provides companies with AI compute resources, has formally opened its first two data centers in the U.K. -- its first outside its domestic U.S. market. CoreWeave opened its European headquarters in London last May, shortly after hitting a $19 billion valuation off the back of a $1.1. billion fundraise. At the same time, the company announced plans to open two data centers as part of a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) investment in the U.K. Today's news coincides with a separate announcement from the U.K. government which details a five-year investment plan to bolster government-owned AI computing capacity, as well as geographic "AI Growth Zones" which includes AI infrastructure from the private sector. "This investment is a huge vote of confidence in the U.K.'s digital technology sector, and is exactly the kind we want to see as we grow the economy and use AI to drive efficiency," Rachel Reeves, U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a statement. CoreWeave's first U.K. data center quietly went live in Crawley back in October, the company said, with the second hub going operational in December in London Docklands. Both locations use Nvidia's Hopper GPUs (graphical processing units), based on its upgraded H200 series of chips designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. Founded in 2017, CoreWeave started out with a focus on crypto mining, but with the surge in demand for AI compute -- that is, the processing power and infrastructure required to carry out computational tasks such as running algorithms and executing machine learning models -- the company repurposed this GPU infrastructure for such workloads. CoreWeave is one of a number of cloud infrastructure startups looking to capitalize on the AI hype wave, including domestic European players such as France's FlexAI; DataCrunch, which is based out of Finland; and Netherlands-based Nebius, which emerged from the ashes of Russian internet giant Yandex. CoreWeave said that it had opened 28 data centers by the end of 2024, which includes the two new ones it officially announced today. Separately, it's also planning 10 new data centers in 2025, three of which will be in Europe, including three previously announced locations in Norway, Sweden, and Spain.