STRESS TEST

With lucrative deals from Nvidia and OpenAI and a market value that has crossed $75 billion—as well as over $8 billion in debt—CoreWeave is a driving force in the AI boom.Amid growing competition, does the company have what it takes to sustain its meteoric rise?

- BY MELISSA ANGELL

It all started with a warning.

As Brian Venturo remembers it, he was sitting at his desk one day in mid-2020 when his mobile phone rang. He didn't recognize the number, but he answered anyway.

“This guy calls me and says, ‘Hi, I’m calling from Nvidia, because you're not supposed to be selling consumer GPUs in the cloud,’” says Venturo, 40, co-founder and chief strategy officer of CoreWeave, a tech juggernaut today that was then an obscure startup.

“My heart dropped,” recalls Venturo. “I thought, ‘Oh, god, I’m about to lose my business.’”

At the time, CoreWeave had been using Nvidia’s consumer-facing gaming GPUs, or graphic processing units, to mine Ethereum, which runs afoul of Nvidia’s user agreement. GPUs are now, of course, one of the essential, building-block technologies for artificial intelligence companies, powering everything from ChatGPT queries to self-driving cars.

In the call, the two discussed how CoreWeave was using Nvidia’s GPUs. Seeing an opportunity, one conversation led to another, and by that summer Nvidia had brought in a business development manager to build a relationship between the two companies. CoreWeave soon joined Nvidia's partner program to purchase data-center GPUs, which are used for higher-level tasks like training AI systems.

CoreWeave quickly repositioned itself as an AI-in-cloud company, turbocharging its growth by becoming one of the largest purchasers of Nvidia's GPUs. The company closed out 2022 with $16 million in revenue. By 2024, that figure had shot up to $1.9 billion. CoreWeave now has 33 data centers across the U.S. and a client list that includes blue-chip customers Microsoft, IBM, and OpenAI—though it works with companies small and large, renting out GPUs by the hour. And the business is built on recurring revenue: Committed customer contracts accounted for 96 percent of its revenue last year, up from 20 percent in 2022.