CoreWeave Doubles Down on DC Office Space

CoreWeave may be all the rage in artificial intelligence and data center circles, but the company clearly sees a need to stay close to the country’s power center.

The firm signed a lease for 23,000 square feet at Nuveen’s 1001 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., Bisnow reported. The deal was disclosed in a third-quarter report from JLL.

The deal expands the company’s office footprint in the building by 79 percent. Still, Nuveen is dealing with more than 356,000 square feet of vacant space at the property, which is nearly half of the building situated blocks from the White House and adjacent to the FBI headquarters.

Additionally, law firm Crowell & Moring is set to depart 280,000 square feet at the property, downsizing to a 199,000-square-foot space at a redeveloped building next to Capital One Arena.

The office vacancy rate in D.C. ticked up slightly in the third quarter, reaching 20.4 percent, according to JLL. Negative absorption in the first nine months of the year was 889,000 square feet.

Negative absorption is not a thing CoreWeave is intimately familiar with these days. Since going public in March, the company’s stock has surged 240 percent as it grows into a critical service provider to the likes of Meta, OpenAI and Nvidia.

As such, CoreWeave has been expanding its physical footprint. The cloud computing heavyweight is teaming up with Poolside to develop a self-powered data center complex in West Texas that will span 500 acres. CoreWeave will anchor the first 250 megawatts of capacity at Horizon, which is expected to come online late next year.

In the summer, CoreWeave paid $322 million for a major foothold in New Jersey’s suburban data center scene, acquiring a portion of the Northeast Science and Technology Center from Onyx Equities and Machine Investment Group.

The sale included a 280,000-square-foot facility at 2000 Galloping Hill Road in Kenilworth and 27 adjacent acres, where CoreWeave is expected to build another 100 megawatts of capacity.

— Holden Walter-Warner