Glenn Hutchins, North Island co-founder and chairman and CoreWeave lead independent director, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss Nvidia's $100 billion investment deal in OpenAI, impact on the broader AI race, H-1B visa changes, state of crypto, the Fed's inflation fight, and more. For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/42d859g
» Subscribe to CNBC TV: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCtelevision
» Subscribe to CNBC: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC
Turn to CNBC TV for the latest stock market news and analysis. From market futures to live price updates CNBC is...
Questions asked in this interview
7
0:41What did you think of what you heard from OpenAI and Nvidia yesterday?
3:13How concerned are you, or not, though, long-term, about how all of these businesses ultimately are financed?
5:48Are these companies going to be big enough, or does the United States need to invest in this or risk losing it to other countries?
6:34Do you think, with Nvidia owning a piece of OpenAI, does it change the dynamic with competitors?
6:54And does Anthropic—or if you're Elon Musk and you run Grok, are you saying to yourself, you know what, I really need to find a competitor that I can use in terms of chips?
7:51Trying to figure out—is it ever going to draw government scrutiny about whether this is good or not?
9:01What are the limiting factors on energy, and do you think we will solve them and resolve them?
All right, welcome back everybody. We know the news at this point. Nvidia saying it's going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI. It's sparking a global tech rally. Computing infrastructure company CoreWeave, which went public earlier this year, is just one of the many companies participating in that rally. It's up about 7% yesterday and another 1.25% this morning. If you take a look at it, that stock has been on a tear since its IPO earlier this year. Joining us right now is Glenn Hutchins. He is North Island's co-founder and chairman. He is also the lead independent director of CoreWeave. And Glenn, it's really a pleasure to have you here today.
Somebody who wears a lot of different hats. Former member, director at the New York Fed. So we thought about starting with the economy. We've got a lot of things to talk about with North Island and crypto and the moves that we've seen there. But AI is really the story of the moment. That's why I think we need to start at this position. What did you think of what you heard from OpenAI and Nvidia yesterday?
My immediate reaction—I wasn't the least bit surprised. My immediate reaction was, this is the kind of scale transactions and scale balance sheets you're going to need to finance what's happening in AI. I've never seen anything so huge as this. When we started building out the infrastructure for semiconductors and hard drives and all those things 20, 30 years ago, we had a very similar problem where you literally could not finance them in normal capital markets. You had to go to places like Singapore and Taiwan, where they basically offered you their government balance sheet in order to get these things built.
And a very similar thing is happening today. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that this is happening, because you're going to need balance sheets on the scale of countries in order to get this done. Or the largest companies in the world like Nvidia. Now, when I was last here in this building with you guys, it was the day of the IPO, and there was a lot of skepticism about the company's business model. And the IPO was a very tough one.
But the business model was highly innovative, in that they figured out how to finance this huge AI build-out, which was to take the project finance framework, taking contracts for the off-take from the cloud computing facilities, matching them with financing that was matched to the cash flows of 4 to 5 years of the useful depreciable lives of the GPUs. And then at the end of that, CoreWeave owning a free option on the used GPUs. So that sort of project financing structure was one that people didn't really understand how CoreWeave was doing it—layering one contract on another. In the last several months, that's become the standard for financing these deals, and it's been adopted by peers and rivals all over the industry. And as a consequence, these companies are growing very rapidly. Street estimates CoreWeave is going to double its revenue this year over last, and is projected by street estimates to double next year. And that's just the tip of the iceberg for all of the financing that's going in. But it's become the template for how this is being financed.
How concerned are you, or not, though, long-term, about how all of these businesses ultimately are financed? Because this is dependent on those GPUs being valued as an asset that is meaningful, that can be used sort of downscale. You use the more advanced chips for the most advanced stuff. These chips that will be five years old will be used for less advanced processing and other things. At least that's the concept. But nobody knows if five years from now those chips will have that value or not.
But you extract roughly two times your money from the chips over the 4 to 5 years of the contract. So they're fully depreciated, basically free. And you have an option to do what you want with them. You can look at all sorts of decline curves or similar types of technology products and guess at what those things will be worth. But they don't have to be worth anything for these companies to work. But the bigger question I thought you were getting at was: is all this infrastructure that's being built going to be able to be used profitably? That's the bigger question and the sort of bigger idea.
It is vendor financing. And by the way, they need to come from other vendors like Dell who are—but you know, that's not unusual to build out something like this, particularly when the vendors have these massive balance sheets that are needed to support the entrepreneurial economy as it grows. GE did it forever. IBM Credit did it forever. I mean, this is not brand new.
Hutchins, G. (2025, September 23). North Island's Glenn Hutchins on Nvidia-OpenAI deal, H-1B visa changes [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1013188/
MLA
Glenn Hutchins. "North Island's Glenn Hutchins on Nvidia-OpenAI deal, H-1B visa changes." CNBC Television, 23 Sep. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1013188/.
BibTeX
@misc{hutchins2025_1013188,
author = {Glenn Hutchins},
title = {North Island's Glenn Hutchins on Nvidia-OpenAI deal, H-1B visa changes},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1013188/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
