CoreWeave came 'out of nowhere.' Now it's poised to make billions off AI with its GPU cloud - V...

🥇 Bonuses, Promotions, and the Best Online Casino Reviews you can trust: https://bit.ly/BigFunCasinoGame

CoreWeave came 'out of nowhere.' Now it's poised to make billions off AI with its GPU cloud - VentureBeat

August 1, 2023 9:20 AM Image: CanvaPro/VentureBeat Head over to our on-demand library to view sessions from VB Transform 2023. Register Here A few months ago, few had heard of CoreWeave, a cloud startup specializing in GPU-accelerated workloads, according to Brannin McBee, the company’s co-founder and chief strategy officer. Now, CoreWeave is poised to make billions off of the generative AI boom with its GPU cloud. “We’ve come out of nowhere,” he told VentureBeat in an interview last week. With over $400 million in new funding; a new $1.6 billion data center in Plano, Texas; and the world’s fastest AI supercomputer built in partnership with Nvidia unveiled last month, the company’s fortunes have shifted dramatically — thanks, in no small part, to Nvidia.  CoreWeave: from crypto mining to GPU acceleration at scale CoreWeave was founded in 2017 by three commodities traders who turned their cryptocurrency mining hobby into an Ethereum mining company, using GPUs to verify blockchain transactions — doing business out of a New Jersey data center. By 2019, the founders had pivoted — fortuitously, in hindsight — to building a specialized cloud infrastructure spanning seven facilities that offered GPU acceleration at scale.  Suddenly, everyone was talking about CoreWeave, which led to an investment “tide shift” in March of this year, said McBee. “People were still able to access GPUs last year, but when it became extremely tight, all of a sudden it was like, where do we get these things?” he explained. AI companies that were using CoreWeave spread the word to VCs, he added, who suddenly saw a gold mine: “They said, ‘Why aren’t we speaking to these guys’?” Event VB Transform 2023 On-Demand Did you miss a session from VB Transform 2023? Register to access the on-demand library for all of our featured sessions. Register Now That led to a massive $221 million Series B funding round in April, which included an investment from Nvidia, and one month later, CoreWeave secured another $200 million.  McBee said CoreWeave did $30 million in revenue last year, will score $500 million this year and has nearly $2 billion already contracted for next year. CNBC reported in June that Microsoft “has agreed to spend potentially billions of dollars over multiple years on cloud computing infrastructure from startup CoreWeave.” “It’s happening very, very quickly,” he said. “We have a massive backlog of client demand we’re trying to build for. We’re also building at 12 different data centers right now. I’m engaged in something like one of the largest builds of this infrastructure on the planet today, at a company that you had never heard of three months ago.” Nvidia has diverted latest AI server chips to CoreWeave In addition to being in the right place with the right technology at the right time, CoreWeave has also benefitted significantly from Nvidia’s strategy to stay dominant in the AI space. Nvidia has allotted a generous number of its latest AI server chips to CoreWeave and away from top cloud providers like AWS, even though supply is tight. That’s because those companies are developing their own AI chips in an attempt to reduce their reliance on Nvidia. “It’s certainly isn’t a disadvantage to not be building our own chips,” McBee admitted. “I would imagine that that certainly helps us in our constant effort to get more GPUs from Nvidia at the expense of our peers.” But while having Nvidia in their corner is “excellent” for CoreWeave, ultimately, McBee said, over time there will a matrix of different pieces and types of infrastructure that support different types of AI models. However, he believes GPUs will remain the infrastructure that supports the most cutting-edge, most compute-intensive models that get developed — and that it will take at least another two years, if not three, for the GPU supply shortage to begin to alleviate. CoreWeave clients include Inflection AI For now, top AI companies like Inflection AI, which recently announced an eye-popping $1.3 billion funding round to build a massive GPU cluster, are using CoreWeave to build it. “They called us and said, ‘Guys, we need you to build one of the most high-performance supercomputers on the planet to support our AI company,'” McBee said. “They call us and they say, ‘Th...