CoreWeave CEO defends AI circular deals as ‘working together’

It’s been quite the year for CoreWeave. In March, the AI cloud infrastructure provider went public in one of the biggest and most anticipated IPOs of the year that didn’t live up to its hype.

Another setback took place in October, when a planned acquisition of the cloud provider’s business partner, Core Scientific, faltered due to skepticism from the acquisition target’s shareholders. 

In the meantime, the firm has acquired a number of different companies, its stock has gone up and down, and it’s been both criticized and lauded for its role in the booming AI data center market. 

In an interview at the Fortune Brainstorm AI summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, CoreWeave’s co-founder and CEO, Michael Intrator, defended his company’s performance from critics, noting that it was in the midst of creating a “new business model” for how cloud computing can be built and run. Their collection of Nvidia GPUs is so valuable, they borrow against it to help finance their business. The executive seemed to imply: If you’re charting a new path, you’re destined to encounter some road bumps along the way.  

“I think people are myopic a lot of times,” Intrator said when questioned about his company’s occasionally unstable stock price. “Yes, it is seesawing,” he admitted, while noting that the CoreWeave IPO took place not long before President Trump’s tariffs went into effect — a notably uncertain moment for the overall economy. 

“We came out into one of the most challenging environments, right around Liberation Day and, in spite of the incredible headwinds, were able to launch a successful IPO,” the CEO told Brainstorm editorial director Andrew Nusca. “I couldn’t be prouder of what the company has accomplished,” he added. 

CoreWeave’s stock may have debuted amid the economic doldrums of March but its price has gone on quite the journey since then. It debuted at $40 and, over the past eight months, has climbed to well over $150, but currently rests at around $90. Its more wary critics have compared it to a meme stock due to its penchant for going up and down. 

Some of the uncertainty around CoreWeave’s stock has been credited to the company’s hefty level of debt. Not long after CoreWeave announced a deal on Monday to issue even more debt to finance its data center buildout, its stock dropped some 8%.

Intrator seems to see his company as a disruptor, one whose unconventional tactics may take some getting used to. “When you introduce a new model, when you introduce a new way of doing business, when you disrupt what has been a static environment, it’s going to take some people some time,” he said during his appearance Tuesday. 

CoreWeave actually started its corporate life as a crypto miner but in short order built itself into a pivotal provider of “AI infrastructure” to some of the tech industry’s most major players. In that role, it provides GPUs to AI developers and has made major partnerships with Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, and other tech titans.  

Another topic broached Tuesday was the notion of “circularity” within the AI industry. “Circular” business deals, in which a small number of powerful AI companies invest in one another, have frequently been criticized and have raised questions about the industry’s long-term economic stability. Perhaps not surprisingly, since Nvidia is one of its investors and its supplier of GPUs, Intrator swatted away such concerns. “Companies are trying to address a violent change in supply and demand,” he said. “You do that by working together.”
 
Since the IPO, CoreWeave has continued to make efforts to expand its business. After it acquired Weights & Biases, an AI developer platform, in March, it went on to acquire OpenPipe, a startup that helps companies create and deploy AI agents through reinforcement learning. In October, it also made deals to acquire Marimo (the creator of an open source notebook) and Monolith, another AI company. It also recently announced an expansion of its cloud partnership with OpenAI and said it has plans to move into the federal market, where it wants to provide cloud infrastructure to U.S. government agencies and the defense industrial base.