CoreWeave announced a major partnership with defense contractor Leidos on July 30, 2026, to deliver secure AI cloud services for U.S. intelligence and defense missions, marking a significant milestone for the AI infrastructure company’s expansion into the federal government market.
The collaboration combines Leidos’ decades of experience delivering mission-critical systems for the U.S. government with CoreWeave’s AI-native cloud platform. Under the partnership, CoreWeave will provide its AI cloud infrastructure while Leidos leads mission integration, secure architecture accreditation support, cyber operations, and customer delivery for intelligence and defense programs.
CoreWeave’s federal push builds on the company’s launch of CoreWeave Federal in October 2025, a dedicated business unit focused on delivering secure, compliant, high-performance AI cloud services to U.S. government agencies and the Defense Industrial Base. The new partnership with Leidos represents CoreWeave’s first major collaboration with an established defense integrator to bring these capabilities to classified environments within Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF).
The partnership will offer several capabilities designed for national security workloads. These include classified AI cloud services for model training and deployment, intelligence analyst augmentation for fusing data from multiple sources and imagery analysis, cyber AI ranges for autonomous defense testing and threat modeling, synthetic data and simulation for mission-relevant training, and edge-to-cloud orchestration connecting centralized platforms with forward-deployed tactical environments.
Jason O’Connor, president of Leidos Intelligence, stated that the collaboration “accelerates delivery for IC and DoW priorities, expanding our nation’s AI superiority,” describing it as “the next evolution of mission technology—sovereign AI compute at scale, secure by design, mission integrated, operationally resilient, and ready for the realities of classified national security work.”
The timing of the announcement reflects intensifying competition for federal AI infrastructure contracts. Earlier this month, SpaceX began negotiating a multi-billion-dollar deal with the Department of Defense for data center capacity for AI workloads, signaling growing government appetite for specialized AI computing infrastructure. CoreWeave’s partnership with Leidos positions the company to compete in this expanding market by leveraging Leidos’ established relationships with intelligence and defense agencies.
CoreWeave has built significant momentum in the commercial AI market, with a $21 billion deal with Meta Platforms and partnerships with OpenAI and other leading AI laboratories. The company reported over $5 billion in revenue and a $66.8 billion backlog as of February 2026, according to the company’s earnings reports. The federal market represents a new growth vector that could diversify CoreWeave’s revenue streams beyond commercial AI labs.
The companies expect the partnership to accelerate delivery of mission-applied AI capabilities aligned with national security needs and provide solutions to unify fragmented AI infrastructure across multiple government domains. The combined capabilities will be designed with federal security controls, auditability, model governance, data protection, and mission continuity as foundational requirements, with compute deployment determined by mission requirements and federal appropriation priorities.
Sources
- CoreWeave Investor Relations — official press release announcing the Leidos partnership, July 30, 2026
- Business Wire — detailed partnership announcement with executive quotes and capability descriptions
- Reuters — reporting on CoreWeave’s $21 billion Meta deal and market position
- Yahoo Finance — analysis of CoreWeave’s federal market entry strategy and growth potential
