the last dinosaur
The GPU-mining herd of 2017 went extinct on the same morning in 2022. One animal came through by being small. It is not small anymore.
On 15 September 2022, Ethereum stopped paying people to run graphics cards. The Merge moved the network to proof of stake, and every warehouse full of GPUs hashing ether became a warehouse full of space heaters. CoreWeave’s filing records its own date: “On September 30, 2022, the Company ceased its Blockchain Mining … due to changes in Ethereum’s reward policy.”
Eleven weeks later OpenAI shipped ChatGPT.
Of everyone who filled a building with graphics cards to mine ether, one is now a public company with $35.6 billion of debt, $16.3 billion of lease liabilities, and Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta on the customer list. That is CoreWeave. It is the last dinosaur: the one animal from the mining era that grew to this size, in a climate that is already turning.
the traders
Start with who built it, because it explains everything after.
Michael Intrator did not come out of computing. He has a political science degree and a master’s in public administration, and he spent sixteen years at Natsource, a carbon-credit trader, selling emission credits. Brian Venturo traded energy there. A former colleague told CNBC they were “the Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen of the carbon markets.” Forbes put the skill they learned more precisely: Intrator “learned how to turn pollution into a financial instrument—just as he would later do with GPUs.”
In 2013 the two started Hudson Ridge Asset Management, a natural gas hedge fund. It did not work. “After his first venture, a natural gas hedge fund, failed,” Forbes writes, “Intrator and his cofounders pivoted, forming Atlantic Crypto in 2017 to mine ether.” Venturo’s explanation on a 2020 podcast is the most honest sentence anyone at the company has said: gas went from “crazy volatile to pretty tame,” and “the volatility junkies that we were … stumbled across Bitcoin.”
“We founded the company on a credit card,” Intrator told Forbes. “It was like, ‘Okay, I’ll buy a couple GPUs. What the hell?’”
The first one sat on a pool table in a Financial District office. Soon the pool table was covered. One weekend with the air conditioning off, the room hit 130 degrees, and the founders loaded the servers into a pickup truck and drove them to Venturo’s grandfather’s garage in New Jersey. Then the crypto winter of 2018 did what winters do to a herd, and Atlantic Crypto ate well. It bought GPUs from failing miners “for pennies on the dollar,” in Forbes’s words, and by the end of 2020 Venturo was describing more than 50,000 of them in five U.S. data centers. Gaming cards, nearly all of them. “At one point, we had 50,000 Nvidia consumer GPUs,” he told TechCrunch.
Remember that fleet. It turns out to be the wrong one.
the workstation years
In December 2019 Atlantic Crypto renamed itself CoreWeave and went looking for something else to do with the hardware. The first answer was not AI. It was Hollywood.
It bought Leonardo Render, a consumer rendering service, in 2019 and brought Concierge Render to market after it. By 2021 the pitch was “highly configurable NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations” for VFX and animation studios, with pixel streaming and batch rendering alongside. Spire Animation put its artists’ “workstations, storage, renderfarm and networking — all in the cloud” on CoreWeave. Molecule VFX moved its workstations over from AWS. The company’s 2021 boast was “the largest deployment of NVIDIA A40 GPUs in North America.”
The A40 tells you what the business was. Nvidia’s own datasheet calls it a “Data Center GPU For Visual Computing”: virtual workstations and render nodes. Its memory moves 696 GB/s. The A100, the card the next generation of models trained on, moves 1,555 to 2,039 GB/s. CoreWeave built a VDI fleet out of graphics cards because graphics cards were what it had. In mid-2020, Venturo told Inc., his phone rang: “Hi, I’m calling from Nvidia, because you’re not supposed to be selling consumer GPUs in the cloud.” His reaction: “My heart dropped.” And then: “I thought, ‘Oh, god, I’m about to lose my business.’”
Did the VDI business fail? Not in the sense of a shutdown. CoreWeave still listed visual effects rendering and pixel streaming in its S-1. On 1 January 2023, a month after ChatGPT, it paid $27 million for Conductor Technologies, a render-farm company, to “strengthen its presence in the media and entertainment sector.” What happened to it is worse, for a pivot, than failing. It never mattered. The S-1 says “prior to 2022, we had limited revenue, most of which was derived from our crypto mining offerings.” Revenue for all of 2022 was $15.8 million, and only 20 percent of it came from committed contracts. In 2024 revenue was $1.9 billion, 96 percent committed, and the artists were not why.
The workstation business didn’t die. It got rounded off.
floated
Here is the fair version of the story CoreWeave tells about itself: it bet on AI early. In December 2020 Venturo said the company had “just committed to helping an organization train an open source version of GPT3.” That was EleutherAI. The GPT-NeoX-20B paper thanks CoreWeave for the GPUs: twelve servers of eight A100s each. Forbes puts the bill at $2 million and says the cluster was “plagued by bugs, networking issues and storage problems.” Intrator: “That was the tuition to learn how to build the infrastructure.”
Look at the cards, though. Not the 50,000 gaming GPUs. Not the A40s. A100s, bought for the job. Forbes says that in 2019 the company swapped out its “crappy” mining GPUs for data center chips. On a 2022 podcast the founders said they “haven’t bought consumer or mining GPUs since 2019,” and Venturo, agreeing with McBee, said a lot of the industry’s old mining hardware “may become e-waste.”
So what carried CoreWeave into AI was not its fleet. It was its supplier. The 2020 phone call turned into a partnership. In December 2022, Forbes reports, Jensen Huang asked to talk, and twenty minutes later the founders were on a Zoom pitching him on investing in “a no-name former crypto miner.” Nvidia invested, and the partnership moved CoreWeave “to the front of the line” for Nvidia’s most cutting-edge chips. Magnetar had put in $100 million in late 2022 so CoreWeave could buy H100s, and then ChatGPT landed. “We went from having nothing sold to having everything sold five times over,” Venturo says.
The IPO tells the same story. CoreWeave marketed 49 million shares at $47 to $55. Demand didn’t show up. Nvidia anchored a scaled-back offering of 37.5 million shares at $40 with a $250 million order. CNBC’s account of the listing opens: “If not for Nvidia, there would be no CoreWeave IPO.” In September 2025 Nvidia agreed to buy any capacity CoreWeave can’t sell, up to $6.3 billion, through April 2032. In January 2026 it bought another $2 billion of stock at $87.20 a share. “All of the GPUs used in our infrastructure today are NVIDIA GPUs,” the 10-K says.
The rent came mostly from one tenant. Microsoft was 62 percent of CoreWeave’s revenue in 2024 and 67 percent in 2025. This year the top customer is down to 36 percent, which is progress, and still a number most landlords would lose sleep over.
Intrator calls the Nvidia relationship “symbiotic.” Huang, asked about circular financing: “the idea that it is circular is — it’s ridiculous.” D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria said it plainer: “CoreWeave wouldn’t exist if Nvidia didn’t want it to.” It did not swim into AI. It floated in, on Nvidia.
what the body is made of
A dinosaur is mostly mass. CoreWeave’s mass is debt, and the debt is secured by the chips.
The venture firms passed. “The overwhelming majority of [investors] thought we were insane,” Intrator told Forbes, so he went to what he calls “East Coast money,” private credit. The first big facility, $2.3 billion in August 2023 led by Magnetar and Blackstone, put Nvidia GPUs up as collateral. The 10-K lists its effective interest rate at 15 percent. This is the Natsource trick again: take a physical thing and make it a financial instrument. Then the climb: $8.0 billion of total debt at the end of 2024, $21.6 billion at the end of 2025, $35.6 billion at the end of June 2026. Interest expense in that last quarter was $640 million against revenue of $2.58 billion. The company lost $626 million.
“No shit, I’m borrowing money,” Intrator told Forbes. McBee: “There’s no risk.”
Now put a clock on the collateral. Intrator told Inc. last year that GPUs are “state-of-the-art for only 18 months.” His accounts depreciate them over six years, a schedule CoreWeave stretched from five in 2023. Nvidia now ships a new chip family every year: Hopper, Blackwell, Rubin. In late 2023 the only place to rent an H100 was a hyperscaler, at a median $7.76 an hour. By late 2025 the same card rented on open marketplaces for about $1.95. Jim Chanos said it simply on Yahoo Finance last December: the neoclouds “don’t make money at eight- or 10-year depreciation,” and if the economic life is three years, “the whole economics of a lot of these deals kind of falls apart.” The whole company lives in the gap between eighteen months and six years.
CoreWeave said the quiet part itself in August, announcing a $2.6 billion loan with a five-year maturity “while its underlying customer contracts average approximately three years.” It called that structure lenders’ “willingness to underwrite renewal risk.” In plain words, the debt outlives the contracts that pay for it, and somebody is betting the tenant renews on a chip two generations old.
The founders have priced that bet their own way. They cashed out nearly $488 million in tender offers before the IPO, TechCrunch reported. Since the IPO, executives have sold more than $2.3 billion more, according to Bloomberg Government, most of it Intrator, McBee and Venturo.
This week the market priced it too. CoreWeave’s stock fell 15.5 percent on Wednesday. At one point its five-year credit default swaps, the price of insuring its debt against default, went past 1,140 basis points, and its 9.75 percent bonds due 2031 were yielding 15.78 percent. “A spread level of 1,000 basis points or above is generally a sign of credit distress,” S&P Global’s Gavan Nolan told CNBC. Evercore ISI’s desk said the market was “basically saying ’no mas’ to AI debt without operating cash flow support.” Intrator wrote in a memo obtained by CNBC: “When you are building a new type of technology company there will be periods of time when the market misunderstands and acts irrationally.”
Be fair about the backlog. It is real: more than $100 billion, about two-thirds of it from investment-grade customers per Deutsche Bank, with Meta signed through 2032 and revenue guided at $12 to 13 billion for this year. Nolan said the same thing: “No one is questioning whether demand for CoreWeave’s services is real … The question is whether the cash flows will ultimately arrive.” Dinosaurs were real too. They ran the planet for a hundred and sixty million years.
we’ve seen this animal
Exodus Communications was the hosting company of the dot-com boom. It “spent billions of dollars of shareholders’ money in building its network of data centres,” The Register wrote, “and captured 46 of the world’s top 150 Web sites as customers.” It filed for Chapter 11 in September 2001. Two months later Cable & Wireless agreed to buy 30 of its 44 data centers for about $575 million in cash plus assumed liabilities. A J.P. Morgan analyst put the assets at $2 billion and the price at “roughly half.” Exodus’s creditors got whatever that came to on the dollar.
“We’ve not just bought assets, we’ve bought … customers and market leadership position,” C&W’s chief executive said. The buildings kept running. The racks got new tenants. The only part of Exodus that didn’t come through was the company that had paid to build them.
That is what every compute boom does. The scarce thing gets built, the company that financed it gets wiped out, and the buildings outlive the balance sheet. The infrastructure is never the dinosaur. The capital structure is.
why the last one
CoreWeave is the template now, and the miners are copying it. Core Scientific, which hosted CoreWeave’s GPUs from 2019 to 2022, nearly became part of it in a $9 billion all-stock deal before its own shareholders voted it down last October. IREN signed $9.7 billion with Microsoft. Cipher signed with AWS. Galaxy is building 800 megawatts in Texas with CoreWeave as the tenant.
But the climate that made a CoreWeave possible had three conditions: a chip nobody could get, a supplier that wanted a sales channel the hyperscalers didn’t control, and customers who couldn’t build fast enough on their own. All three are wearing off. Every lab at scale is designing its own silicon. Anthropic is borrowing from Broadcom to lease TPUs. Gartner now predicts that 80 percent of neocloud providers will cease independent operations by 2030. The miners walking CoreWeave’s path are arriving after the weather peaked.
The dinosaurs that came through the last extinction were the small ones. We call them birds.
CoreWeave came through the Merge the same way: a garage, a gas fund that hadn’t worked, a warehouse of gaming cards, and what Intrator calls “a willingness to change.” It survived because it was small.
It is not small anymore. It is $35.6 billion of debt standing on chips its own CEO says are state of the art for eighteen months, waiting to see what the weather does.
Sources: CoreWeave S-1 ↗ · CoreWeave IPO prospectus ↗ · CoreWeave 10-K, FY2025 ↗ · CoreWeave 10-Q, Q2 2026 ↗ · CoreWeave Q2 2026 results ↗ · CoreWeave $2.6B DDTL 5.5 release ↗ · CoreWeave, “Past, Present & Future” ↗ · CoreWeave, Spire Animation ↗ · CoreWeave, Elite CSP announcement ↗ · CoreWeave, Magnetar raise (2021) ↗ · On the Brink EP.163, Venturo (2020) ↗ · On the Brink EP.366, Venturo & McBee (2022) ↗ · Forbes, “CoreWeave’s $29 billion bet” ↗ · Inc., “How CoreWeave bought and borrowed its way to AI domination” ↗ · TechCrunch, 50,000 consumer GPUs ↗ · CNBC, the road to the IPO ↗ · Ethereum.org, the Merge ↗ · OpenAI, ChatGPT launch ↗ · GPT-NeoX-20B paper ↗ · NVIDIA A40 datasheet ↗ · NVIDIA A100 datasheet ↗ · Yahoo Finance, IPO ↗ · RCR Wireless, Nvidia backstop ↗ · CoreWeave, Nvidia $2B investment ↗ · Capacity Media, Huang ↗ · Bloomberg Law, $2.3B GPU-backed loan ↗ · CoreWeave–Meta $21B agreement ↗ · CNBC, 2026 guidance ↗ · Silicon Data, H100 rental prices ↗ · Chanos via Yahoo Finance ↗ · NBC, Nvidia’s annual cadence ↗ · TechCrunch, founders’ $488M ↗ · Bloomberg Government, $2.3B in insider sales ↗ · CNBC, credit default swaps ↗ · Fortune, neocloud debt ↗ · The Register, C&W buys Exodus ↗ · Light Reading, C&W takes on Exodus ↗ · Computerworld, Exodus sells to C&W ↗ · Core Scientific–CoreWeave hosting ↗ · Core Scientific vote ↗ · IREN and Cipher deals ↗ · Galaxy Helios ↗