CoreWeave is an AI cloud computing platform founded in 2017. The company provides cutting edge hardware and software that is able to train AI models faster. The core technology is graphics processing units or GPUs, and CoreWeave has some 250,000 of them warehoused across 33 data centers mostly in the US that CoreWeave operates, renting out access to their number crunching prowess to compute hungry customers. Once popular for rendering graphics for video games and mining crypto, which CoreWeave also used to do, GPUs have become a crucial engine for artificial intelligence.
Access to the GPUs commonly designed by Nvidia can determine a company's fortunes since they're expensive and not so easy to come by. And CoreWeave, which trades on the NASDAQ, has built a $50 billion market cap business by becoming one of their go-to brokers. They serve the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta in the race for AI ascendancy.
Startups have been strapped for these sophisticated chips since ChatGPT was launched and exploded in popularity in 2022, with even OpenAI this past February delaying rolling out a major model upgrade because it ran out of chips to run it on.
That means whoever has the GPUs holds the keys to an enormous business opportunity. The AI cloud computing market was 230 billion in 2024 and assuming the boom continues and doesn't become a bust, is poised to explode to 400 billion by 2028 according to Wall Street analysts.
We are critical aspects to the launch of many of the AI models that everyone knows and uses today. And like, without our infrastructure, without our backbone supporting these launches, they simply wouldn't happen.
CoreWeave's stock price has more than doubled since its March IPO, trouncing the broader NASDAQ's return of 23.9% and minting at least five billionaires in the process. CEO Michael Intrator, who's 56, is now worth 6.7 billion as of September 1st, landing him on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans for the first time. Co-founders Brandon McBride and Peter Seni, as well as early investor and board member Jack Kogan, are also new billionaires thanks to CoreWeave.
Nvidia has been a significant partner for CoreWeave, and CoreWeave CEO describes the relationship as highly symbiotic though not equal. CoreWeave buys Nvidia's chips. Nvidia is also a customer of CoreWeave and has agreed to buy CoreWeave's unused capacity through 2032 in an agreement that's currently worth about 6 billion but subject to change. Nvidia also invested some 350 million into CoreWeave, and that investment is now worth around 2.5 billion.
CoreWeave's cloud infrastructure is designed to optimize the delivery of Nvidia's technical solutions to their target market. By focusing their engineering resources on this specific use case, CoreWeave has developed world class expertise in building and delivering the necessary infrastructure that's also been dependent on their ability to finance it all, since GPUs and giant data center builds are extremely expensive.
I always say that one of the things that we did so well is we really understood what Silicon Valley and the West Coast capital is built to do, which is this incredible 'we're going to change the world, we're going to make investments that, you know, they may succeed, they may fail, but their incredible capacity to go on the adventure of trying to build new things that really bend the curve of technology and bend the curve of humanity.' At the same time, what we had that was unique was an understanding of what it's like to come back to the East Coast to walk into the offices of private lenders like Blackstone and Magnetar, guys who are in the debt markets that have a incredibly different lens on how they face the world.
CoreWeave has successfully wooed the debt markets and raised some 29 billion in debt financing. But with so much debt also comes interest. And the company spent more than 250 million paying interest on that debt last quarter on just 19 million in operating income. However, as CoreWeave pays down that debt and refinances it starting next year, that interest expense should go down. Plus, about half of CoreWeave's assets are GPUs, which are said to depreciate over 6 years or less, now that Nvidia is upgrading its chips faster. Still, CoreWeave says interest and infrastructure costs are built into its multi-year contracts. I think the average length is about 4 years, meaning that there should be some profit left over at the end of each contract.
In less than a decade, the Livingston, New Jersey based business has spun up a data center empire. They booked 2.2 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025 on net losses of about 600 million. By 2031, it hopes to bring in another 30 billion in revenue, mostly from contracts with Microsoft and OpenAI and a string of AI startups such as Cohere and Mistral.
CoreWeave started when Intrator, Venturo, and McBride started experimenting with cryptocurrency mining, beginning with one GPU purchased on a credit card and eventually scaling to thousands.
As a group, we were working with the GPUs, you know, scattered across the pool table, plugged into every outlet we could find. And ultimately, you know, they shut down the air conditioner in August over the weekends, and we came in on a Monday and it was like, I don't know, 130 degrees in the office, and I flipped. I was just like, this wasn't really built for this. We kind of have overdone it. We got to get the stuff out of here.
They moved their operations to Brian Venturo's grandfather's garage in New Jersey and began to focus more intensely on the project as they received outside interests from their commodities trader peers who wanted to get into cryptocurrency. When crypto experienced one of its periodic crashes in 2018, the co-founders bought thousands of GPUs from miners going out of business for pennies on the dollar. That allowed them to rake in an estimated 80 million in revenue from mining mostly ether.
