CoreWeave's new AI investment: Chance the Rapper

• CoreWeave is taking a chance on Chance the Rapper.
• He stars in the company's first major brand campaign, which is aimed at AI decision-makers.
• CoreWeave's marketing push comes as the AI boom's big spenders face investor scrutiny.

CoreWeave is enlisting Chance the Rapper to help define its next act as investors increasingly scrutinize the AI boom's big spenders.

The Grammy Award-winning artist fronts CoreWeave's first major brand campaign, "Ready for anything, ready for AI," which showcases what customers are doing on its AI cloud platform. The campaign marks the company's first foray into podcast advertising and also includes TV, digital, and San Francisco airport ads.

In an interview with Business Insider, CoreWeave CMO Jean English, who joined the company last year, said the marketing push aims to position the company as a leader in an emerging "AI cloud" category. English said CoreWeave wants to define its key points of difference versus legacy cloud providers, and it's targeting its ads at technologists who are focused on inventing or advancing AI.

"We're in a historical moment right now with AI," English said. "Our main goal of this campaign was to codify our leadership at this pivotal moment in time."

Nvidia-backed CoreWeave is fresh off a brutal post-earnings share price slump. Its shares traded down about 27% over the past five days.

Investors were spooked after the highly leveraged company said it plans to spend at least $30 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. Wall Street is concerned about the company's high debt-to-equity ratio and AI-dependent business model. Business Insider's Dan Geiger recently scooped that the asset manager Blue Owl Capital was unable to raise debt financing for a data center expected to be occupied by CoreWeave because lenders were reluctant to add exposure to AI firms with below-investment-grade credit.

CoreWeave has said the spending is justified by the demand for its infrastructure.

"The AI demand is not theoretical, and our backlog shows that," English said. Backlog refers to CoreWeaves's roughly $60 billion "contracted revenue backlog" — deals it has signed but hasn't yet recognized as revenue.

Breaking down the numbers

English said CoreWeave is being "very disciplined" with its ad spend.

It's working with the boutique marketing agencies Noble People and Dietzworkz on its media strategy and creative, respectively. While one of the campaign's aims is to boost brand awareness, the company has deliberately sought out media outlets to reach key decision-makers, including tech founders, chief technology officers, chief information officers, and chief financial officers.

CoreWeave's national TV buys have been exclusively on cable news networks since the start of 2025, per the TV measurement firm iSpot. Its national ad buys this year have been exclusively on CNBC, while 4.2% of its reach came via local ad placements, iSpot said.

Tyler Bobin, director of brand solutions at iSpot, said CoreWeave's estimated $37,000 in TV ad spend this year is modest compared to its AI competitors. Anthropic and OpenAI, for example, bought pricey Super Bowl ads.

"We thought about doing the Super Bowl, but that's like 30 seconds," English said. The average price for 30 seconds of airtime during Super Bowl LX was $8 million, with some spots selling for more than $10 million, according to this year's big game broadcaster, NBCUniversal.

Podcast analytics platform Podscribe estimates that CoreWeave spent $173,000 on podcast ads in February. CoreWeave had never run podcast campaigns before. The company focused spending on host- and producer-read ads on a handful of buzzy shows, including "Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway," LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman's "Masters of Scale," and Vox's "Today, Explained."

CoreWeave began ramping up its marketing in a big way last year.

CoreWeave's annual sales and marketing expenses reached $144 million in 2025, up 700% from 2024. Nitin Agrawal, CoreWeave's CFO, said on its earnings call last month that the increase "was driven by investments in scaling our go-to-market organization to capture the rapid growth of the AI opportunity."

The company's estimated US ad spend grew to $7.1 million last year, up from $900,000 in 2024, per the advertising research firm COMvergence.

Patti Williams, associate professor of marketing at Wharton, said CoreWeave's marketing moves and choice of a high-profile spokesperson, Chance the Rapper, are meant to signal its credibility and ambition to customers, the capital markets, employees, and competitors.

"That's the consumerization of B2B marketing in many ways," Williams said, referring to business-to-business marketing. "It speaks to the kind of company they want to be and the kind of company they think they're competing with."