March 27 (Reuters) - CoreWeave plans to reduce the size

of its U.S. initial public offering and price the shares below

range, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on

Thursday.

The Nvidia-backed cloud services provider is now

looking to sell 37.5 million shares and price them below the

range at $40 apiece, the source added, requesting anonymity

discussing confidential information.

The sale would fetch up to $1.5 billion.

The listing is being closely watched as a test for the

fragile U.S. IPO market and a gauge of whether investor

enthusiasm for AI newcomers remains strong or is waning.

CoreWeave and some existing investors had initially aimed to

sell 49 million shares in the offering priced between $47 and

$55 each to raise as much as $2.7 billion.

The company did not immediately respond to Reuters' request

for comment.

Despite the AI boom, there are growing concerns that data

center spending will be uneven, with investments concentrated

among a few giants while others struggle to keep pace.

DeepSeek, China's low-cost AI rival, has also emerged as a

growing threat, fueling concerns about pressure on data center

spending.

Nvidia will anchor the CoreWeave IPO at the price, a source

close to the matter told Reuters.

The downsizing was first reported by Semafor on Thursday.

CoreWeave, founded in 2017 as a crypto miner, had initially

planned to raise over $3 billion in its share sale at a

valuation topping $35 billion, sources told Reuters in November.

Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the lead

underwriters of the IPO.

CoreWeave aims to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker

symbol "CRWV."