Brian Venturo and a couple of fellow hedge fund buddies bought their first GPUs as part of an elaborate joke. It was late 2016, and for the fun of playing with something volatile that could be either trash or treasure, they had been staking their pool and fantasy football games with bitcoin instead of cash. When bitcoin prices surged, Venturo says, the group realized, “Maybe we should take this seriously.”
The friends rush-ordered GPUs, also known as graphics chips, for same-day delivery from Amazon to start mining bitcoin while their enthusiasm ran hot. The powerful processors are prized for their ability to crunch the math of crypto-mining at high speeds. Over time, the hobby turned into a business called Atlantic Crypto, which filled a garage and later warehouses with GPUs. Some of the beefy chips were rented out via the cloud to armchair cryptocurrency miners. As coin prices climbed, time was money, so the company’s technicians grew skilled at speedily installing GPUs and pushing their performance to the brink.
When crypto prices cratered heading into 2019, Venturo and team pivoted. They raised money to buy cut-price GPUs from struggling crypto miners, rebranded as CoreWeave, and offered up their tens of thousands GPUs as a specialist cloud service for companies in need of the powerful chips, like visual effects studios and AI startups. GPUs are essential to machine learning projects like training algorithms to process images or text. CoreWeave was unknown in those spheres, but won over clients by dropping everything to address support queries. “We would resolve things in 15 minutes,” a manager from that era says. “The dedication to customers was phenomenal.”
Everything changed after OpenAI debuted ChatGPT late in 2022. A rush of interest and investment in all things generative AI caused a GPU shortage—especially of Nvidia’s prized chips. With its couple of data centers packed with GPUs and a long-standing relationship with Nvidia, CoreWeave quickly became vital to the accelerating AI hype train. The company picked up clients including Microsoft, OpenAI’s crucial sponsor, and image-generation startup Stability AI, according to former CoreWeave employees. Venturo’s biggest regret is not ordering more Nvidia chips back when he could. “If I had unlimited amounts, I could have it all sold in two weeks,” he says.
Things still worked out. As demand for CoreWeave’s GPUs surged through 2023, the company piled its new revenue into buying more of the chips and building out new data centers. A company that began as a beer-money side project now doesn’t touch crypto, and is all in on cloud computing. Over the past year the startup has picked up a $2.3 billion loan—using GPUs as collateral—and nearly $2.2 billion in investment funding, including $1.1 billion announced this week, from investors including Nvidia. With its latest infusion of cash, the startup’s valuation jumped to $19 billion.
By the end of this year, CoreWeave expects to have 28 data center campuses spread across a dozen or more US states, Europe, and potentially Asia—overall more than nine times its footprint at the beginning of 2023. Venturo, who is now CoreWeave’s chief strategy officer, says long-term contracts to supply AI giants justify the buildout. “It’s transformed this small cloud startup into one of the biggest juggernauts,” he says. “We’re lucky enough to be in this position because of this crazy origin story where we had so much expertise building at this rapid, frenetic pace.”