THE GREAT COMPUTE CRAPSHOOT

A KNACK FOR CREATIVE FINANCING AND AN ENORMOUS APPETITE FOR RISK HELPED COREWEAVE'S MICHAEL INTRATOR RIDE THE AI DATA CENTER BOOM TO A $6.7 BILLION PERSONAL FORTUNE. BUT AS BUBBLE FEARS MOUNT, HIS RELIANCE ON BILLIONS IN DEBT TO SUPPLY ADVANCED GPU CHIPS TO ALL THE MAJOR AI PLAYERS PUTS HIM IN A POWERFUL-AND PRECARIOUS-POSITION.

- By RASHI SHRIVASTAVA and PHOEBE LIU

It was a sunny day in August 2017, and CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator was beginning to think he might actually set his Manhattan office tower on fire.

Dozens of powerful Nvidia GPUs were plugged into every available outlet, churning through the convoluted math required to mine cryptocurrency, and they were throwing off a ton of heat. With the air conditioning turned off for the weekend, the sixth-floor Financial District office had turned into a 130-degree hotbox. “I flipped. This wasn’t really built for this,” Intrator says. “I was just like, ‘We've got to go. We've got to go.’”

He and his cofounders, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee, scrambled, frantically disconnecting servers that were almost too hot to touch and loading them into a pickup truck before heading to New Jersey, where a garage properly ventilated with a gigantic exhaust fan waited to cool them.

Nearly a decade later, some things haven't changed. Intrator is still running GPUs, but on an exponentially larger scale. Now he’s got some 250,000 of them warehoused across the 33 data centers 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, GPUs (graphics processing units), commonly designed by chip giant Nvidia, have become a crucial engine for artificial intelligence. Access to them can determine a company’s fortunes, and CoreWeave, which trades on the Nasdaq, has built a $50 billion (market cap) business by becoming one of their go-to brokers, serving the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta in the race for AI ascendency.