AI mania tanks CoreWeave’s Core Scientific acquisition — it buys Python notebook Marimo

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

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

Core Scientific, which began as a crypto miner and still is one, shares that early history with AI data center provider CoreWeave, which also started as a miner.  

But CoreWeave, with investor and partner Nvidia, has now transitioned to serving AI workloads. From its IPO until now, its stock has soared from a $14 billion market cap to $66 billion today (about $140 per share) as investors view it as a way to get in on the AI action. It has been spending those shares on acquisitions.  

CoreWeave had already signed a $10 billion, 12-year contract with Core Scientific to use its facilities for AI services, even as it nailed down a deal announced in July to buy the company outright. The offer was a premium to Core Scientific’s share price at the time.

But investor Toussi thinks Core Scientific can turn into another CoreWeave on its own. “Since the transaction was announced in July, investment in AI infrastructure has accelerated, driving equity valuations of Core Scientific’s peers to ever-greater heights,” he wrote in his opposition letter. “Why would anyone vote for a transaction worth a mere $16.40 per share?” 

So investors turned down the deal and CoreWeave walked. Core Scientific’s stock rose on the news, and the company is now trading at a $6.6 billion market cap. 

Investors turning down acquisition bids in pursuit of bigger offers is another sign that we’re in — or at least headed for — an AI bubble. 

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

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