How CoreWeave Went From Crypto Mining to Wall Street’s A.I. Bellwether

In 2016, three New York commodities traders — Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee — fell in love with cryptocurrencies. They were using Bitcoin to bet on pool games and fantasy football and were captivated by its wild swings in price.
They soon decided to create more digital currencies through a process called “mining,” which requires a lot of computing power. So they logged on to Amazon and ordered two Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, powerful chips that can run calculations and analyze enormous amounts of data. They then stockpiled the components, filling up a garage and a warehouse.
In 2017, Mr. Intrator, Mr. Venturo and Mr. McBee started the company Atlantic Crypto to mine cryptocurrencies. When crypto prices cratered two years later, they renamed the business CoreWeave and raised money to buy as many GPUs from distressed crypto miners as possible. Their bet: that the chips would eventually feed the development of artificial intelligence, whose creation also requires substantial computing power.
They were right. When OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022 and unleashed an A.I. frenzy, the demand for computing power exploded — and CoreWeave was in the sweet spot.