CoreWeave pivoted from a crypto-mining firm to a $43 billion AI company. Its CEO says being “nerdy” helped the transformation.
Michael Intrator, the company’s cofounder and CEO, said CoreWeave’s early days in crypto gave it an edge in understanding how to use GPUs, the chips now powering the AI boom.
“We’re pretty nerdy, we dig under the hood,” Intrator said on an episode of the All-In podcast recorded at Nvidia’s GTC conference and released Monday.
CoreWeave started by mining Ethereum and weathered multiple crypto downturns, including the 2018 crash that sent Bitcoin tumbling from nearly $20,000 to around $3,000 in just 12 months.
“We weathered crypto winter really well and immediately started to look for other use cases,” Intrator said.
That approach — treating computing power as flexible infrastructure rather than a single-purpose, crypto-focused bet — positioned the company to capitalize when demand for AI surged after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Today, CoreWeave sells large-scale GPU capacity to AI companies and cloud providers, and calls itself the “first true hyperscaler.”
The company has rapidly scaled alongside that demand, raising tens of billions of dollars to finance its infrastructure buildout. Its market capitalization was $43.6 billion as of Tuesday afternoon, according to Yahoo Finance.
Some investors are skeptical of the model, which relies heavily on debt to fund expansion. Kerrisdale Capital took a short position in CoreWave last year, saying the company “isn’t pioneering the future of AI — it’s a debt-fueled GPU rental business with no moat.”
The company has publicly pushed back, including with the launch of its first major ad campaign — starring Chance the Rapper — called “Ready for anything, ready for AI.”
Intrator is also pushing back. In the Monday interview, he described the company as an “innovator” in how it finances its operations. He described a structure that bundles customer contracts, GPUs, and data center agreements into a single vehicle that governs cash flow. Customers like Nvidia and Microsoft pay into the structure, which then covers costs like power, debt, and operations before returning profits to CoreWeave.
“It’s called a box,” he said. “But what’s important to understand is the economics in this box are such that within 2.5 years of a five-year deal, we have paid for everything.”
