Shares of CoreWeave, the first artificial intelligence start-up to go public, finished its first day of trading at $40.01 a share, one penny above the disappointing initial public offering price the company had set a day earlier.
The company’s share price, trading under the ticker symbol CRWV, signaled concern among Wall Street investors about the economy and CoreWeave’s business model.
The faltering day of trading came amid a slumping stock market and uncertainty around inflation and President Trump’s tariffs. The S&P 500 dropped 2 percent on Friday, one of its worst days since Mr. Trump’s election.
The listing’s reduced price — CoreWeave estimated a range of $47 to $55 in earlier filings — already reflected skepticism from investors compared with a month ago. The company’s trading opened at $39 a share on Friday, even after CoreWeave dropped the size and value of its I.P.O.
CoreWeave, which runs data centers that help power giant A.I. systems, also raised just $1.5 billion in the offering, compared with the $4 billion that analysts had anticipated.
In an interview on Friday, Michael Intrator, CoreWeave’s chief executive, said that concerns about the stock market and the A.I. industry had caused the company to reduce its listing, but that the timing of its offering would still benefit the company in the long run.
“This is just a day, and we’ll get through this day, and we’ll keep moving,” Mr. Intrator said. “Getting into the public markets is what matters for us.”
It is unclear if the stock’s performance will signal the start of the I.P.O. parade that some investors hoped it would. Among the companies watching CoreWeave’s public debut on Friday were Klarna, the online lending service, and StubHub, the ticketing company, which are both anticipating public listings this year.
“This is not an easy I.P.O. market,” said Samuel Kerr, the head equity capital market analyst at Mergermarket, a financial insights firm. “It shows you that the U.S. I.P.O. market is not as strong as perhaps even CoreWeave thought it was going to be at the beginning of the year.”
A more ideal time for CoreWeave’s public listing would have been toward the end of last year, after Mr. Trump was elected but before the stock market correction and release of a new chatbot by the Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek, Mr. Kerr added.
It hasn’t helped that the stock price of Nvidia, the supplier of CoreWeave’s computer chips and one of its main investors, has reeled in the last week, down 9 percent since Wednesday.
Some analysts remain skeptical of CoreWeave’s considerable debt, which it took on to build more data centers, the large facilities that house its A.I. chips. While the company’s revenue jumped to $1.9 billion last year from $229 million a year earlier, it lost $863 million after spending nearly $1 billion to finance its debt.
“The very high debt profile is something that I.P.O. investors have really disliked for quite a long time,” Mr. Kerr said.
CoreWeave was founded as a cryptocurrency mining start-up in 2017, but it shifted to using its powerful Nvidia chips for A.I. development after OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022.
Among CoreWeave’s customers are Microsoft, which accounted for most of its revenue last year, and OpenAI, which announced a nearly $12 billion deal with CoreWeave in the weeks leading up to its I.P.O.
