AI obsession destroys CoreWeave’s core scientific acquisition – it buys Python Marimo notebook

Core Scientific shareholders voted Thursday to reject an all-stock takeover offer from partner and competitor CoreWeave that was valued at the time at $9 billion.

They did so after a recommendation to vote no from their largest shareholder, Sina Tosi of Two Seas Capital, a firm that focuses on post-bankruptcy companies. Core Scientific emerged from bankruptcy in January 2024.

Core Scientific, which started as a cryptocurrency miner and continues to do so, shares this early history with AI data center provider CoreWeave, which also started as a miner.

But CoreWeave, with investor and partner Nvidia, has now moved into serving AI workloads. From its IPO to now, its shares have risen from a market cap of $14 billion to $66 billion today (about $140 per share) as investors look to it as a way to get involved in the work of artificial intelligence. Those shares have been spent on acquisitions.

CoreWeave has already signed a $10 billion, 12-year contract with Core Scientific to use its facilities for AI services, even after it closed a deal announced in July to buy the company outright. The offer represented a premium to Core Scientific’s stock price at the time.

But investor Toussi believes Core Scientific could turn into another CoreWeave on its own. “Since the deal was announced in July, investment in AI infrastructure has accelerated, pushing the stock valuations of Core Scientific’s peers to ever-higher levels,” he wrote in his opposition letter. “Why would anyone vote for a deal that is only worth $16.40 per share?”

So investors rejected the deal and CoreWeave agreed. Core Scientific stock rose on the news, and the company now trades with a market cap of $6.6 billion.

Investors rejecting takeover offers in pursuit of larger offers is another sign that we are in — or at least heading toward — an AI bubble.

Meanwhile, CoreWeave is still shopping around. On Thursday, it turned around and acquired Marimo, an open source competitor to Jupyter Notebook, for an undisclosed sum. PitchBook estimates Marimo has raised about $5 million.

Python notebooks are development tools that combine code, rich media, and explanatory text into a single, shareable file. They are often used for interactive data analysis as well as AI application development, helping CoreWeave as it attempts to move up the stack from hosting to building AI applications.