Chapter 1: The Basement Beginning
Every great tech story has a setting. Apple had its garage. Facebook had its dorm room. CoreWeave? It began in the dimly lit basements of New Jersey, humming with the constant, insect-like buzz of overworked GPUs.
The year was 2017. Ethereum was exploding, Bitcoin was on its own manic run, and anyone with a knack for tinkering suddenly found themselves in the middle of a digital gold rush.
Three guys—Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee—weren’t Wall Street veterans or Silicon Valley stars. They were, at heart, nerds with a taste for risk.
- Intrator, once a Wall Street energy trader, brought an instinct for markets.
- Venturo, a programmer, had been deep in the weeds of crypto long before it was cool.
- McBee, the youngest, had a strategist’s brain but also a gambler’s heart.
Together, they filled rooms with racks of GPUs meant for gaming but now bent toward a single purpose: mining Ethereum.
It wasn’t glamorous. The rigs ran hot, dust collected on cables, and the noise was relentless. Yet the operation worked. At one point, they were responsible for a noticeable slice of Ethereum’s global hash rate.
What they didn’t know yet: those very GPUs, whirring in basements, would be their ticket into a far bigger future.
Chapter 2: The GPU Obsession
Most people who mined crypto back then thought about cashing out, trading coins, or speculating.
The CoreWeave founders thought differently. They were obsessed with the GPUs themselves.
GPUs (graphics processing units) were designed for video games, but in practice, they were flexible engines—perfect not only for gaming and crypto hashing but for parallel workloads of all kinds.
Venturo was the first to realize it. He told the others:
“This isn’t about Ethereum. The coins are a distraction. It’s about compute. Pure compute.”
That sentence stuck.
Crypto mining was fickle. Margins shrank, regulation loomed, and hardware aged fast. But the founders realized they weren’t really building a mining company. They were accidentally building a GPU infrastructure giant.
Chapter 3: The Pivot Nobody Expected
By 2019, CoreWeave took a bold pivot.
While much of the crypto world clung to endless bull-run dreams, the founders repurposed their GPUs and started pitching a specialized GPU cloud service.
- Not a general cloud like AWS.
- Not a hobbyist’s rental service.
- But a GPU-focused cloud for industries where parallel horsepower mattered most.
Hollywood Was the First Bet
Studios and VFX houses were drowning in rendering work. CoreWeave’s pitch was simple:
“We have the GPUs. You can rent them. Pay only for what you need.”
It worked. Animators who once queued jobs for days suddenly saw results in hours.
Still, credibility was a hurdle. Intrator recalls:
“We were pitching against Amazon. People would look at us like—who the hell are you guys?”
Chapter 4: Building the Anti-AWS
The cloud wars were dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Most startups wouldn’t dare compete.
But CoreWeave didn’t try to beat them at everything. They went niche.
- AWS was built for flexibility.
- CoreWeave was built for raw GPU performance.
Need thousands of GPUs tuned for AI training? They had them.
Need NVIDIA A100s and H100s, impossible to buy on the open market? They stockpiled them.
Need workloads optimized for rendering, AI inference, or compute-heavy jobs? CoreWeave was tuned for it.
By staying laser-focused, they became indispensable.
Chapter 5: The AI Wave Hits
Then came 2022–2023.
AI went from fringe to mainstream. ChatGPT exploded. Suddenly, every company wanted GPUs.
And who had them? CoreWeave.
Years of hoarding and optimization paid off. AI companies shut out by AWS or Azure called CoreWeave. Investors whispered their name:
“Try CoreWeave. They can actually get you GPUs.”
Almost overnight, CoreWeave went from Hollywood’s secret rendering shop to a key player in the AI gold rush.
Chapter 6: The Money Flood
Money follows heat. And CoreWeave’s rise attracted billions.
- In 2023, they raised massive funding rounds from SoftBank, Magnetar, and more.
- By mid-2024, CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion.
- Debt markets opened, fueling even more GPU stockpiling from NVIDIA.
Their relationship with NVIDIA became symbiotic: NVIDIA needed partners to deploy chips at scale, and CoreWeave had the know-how.
From basement miners to billion-dollar moguls—all in under a decade.
Chapter 7: The Critics and the Doubts
Of course, success brings critics.
- Overdependence on NVIDIA: If supply falters or competition catches up, their edge could vanish.
- Hyperscaler threats: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google could pour resources into GPU cloud and outmuscle them.
- Sustainability issues: Massive GPU data centers consume enormous electricity and cooling.
Some environmentalists argue CoreWeave is just crypto mining reborn—same energy hunger, new packaging.
The founders remain unfazed. Venturo puts it simply:
“People thought crypto was dead ten times. They’ll say the same about AI. But compute isn’t going anywhere.”
Chapter 8: The Future at the Edge
CoreWeave’s ambitions go beyond cloud.
- Expanding U.S. data centers.
- Partnering with energy providers.
- Securing long-term power contracts.
- Hiring aggressively for scale.
Their vision? To become the backbone of the AI era—the invisible infrastructure powering chatbots, models, and rendering pipelines.
Chapter 9: Why CoreWeave Matters
CoreWeave isn’t just a hot startup. It’s a case study in timing and obsession.
- Ethereum miners became AI infrastructure kings.
- A niche hobby became a $19B company.
It shows that innovation doesn’t always come from obvious places. Sometimes, it comes from basements filled with noisy GPUs and founders willing to pivot hard.
In a world racing toward AI, CoreWeave’s story is a parable: the tools we build for one gold rush often fuel the next.
Epilogue: The Hum Never Stops
If you stand near a CoreWeave data center, you’ll hear it: the steady hum of thousands of GPUs.
Not so different from those New Jersey basements in 2017.
The setting has changed. The stakes are higher. The numbers astronomical. But at the core, it’s the same: take raw compute, aim it at the future, and ride the wave.
For Intrator, Venturo, and McBee, that hum isn’t just noise. It’s the sound of opportunity. The sound of risk.
The sound of CoreWeave.