COREWEAVE

In 2017 three commodities traders — Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee — started a company to mine Ethereum. They called it Atlantic Crypto and filled data centers with Nvidia GPUs.

Then the 2018 crypto crash wiped out mining profits. Instead of selling the chips, they asked a better question.

Who else needs thousands of GPUs? The answer turned out to be AI companies.

In 2019 they renamed the company CoreWeave and started renting compute. Peter Salanki joined as CTO to build the cloud.

CoreWeave rents Nvidia GPUs to companies training and running AI models. It is a specialized cloud, built only for heavy AI workloads, not general computing.

Customers like AI labs pay to reserve huge blocks of compute, often on long contracts. CoreWeave funds the chips with mountains of debt, using the GPUs themselves as collateral.

In plain terms, it borrows billions to buy Nvidia chips, then rents them out for more than the loan costs. When demand is high, the math is fantastic.

CoreWeave's core offering is its GPU cloud — access to the latest Nvidia chips like the H100 and GB200, tuned for AI training and inference. It sells reserved clusters for big customers who need guaranteed capacity.

It also provides the networking and storage that make giant AI jobs run fast. The whole product is speed and scale that general clouds struggle to match.

CoreWeave's trick was getting Nvidia's best chips before almost anyone else. Nvidia invested $100 million in 2023 and treated CoreWeave as a favored partner.

That early access let CoreWeave sign giant customers desperate for compute. Microsoft became a huge client.

OpenAI signed a multi-billion-dollar deal in 2025. To pay for it all, CoreWeave raised enormous debt facilities led by Blackstone and Magnetar.

Then it went public in March 2025 to raise even more.

Debt and concentration. CoreWeave has borrowed enormous sums to buy chips, and those chips lose value as newer ones ship.

A big slice of its revenue comes from just a few customers like Microsoft and OpenAI. If one walks away, or if AI demand slows, the debt does not go away.

Critics call it a leveraged bet that the AI boom never cools. The founders are betting billions that it will not.

Nvidia is the name that matters. It invested about $100 million in 2023, put in a $250 million order at the IPO, and agreed to buy CoreWeave's unsold capacity through 2032.

Magnetar Capital and Coatue were major backers. Blackstone and Magnetar led debt facilities worth billions.

The March 2025 IPO raised $1.5 billion on the Nasdaq under the ticker CRWV. It was the largest AI-related listing by money raised at the time.