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How Scrappy Cryptominer CoreWeave Transformed Into the Multibillion-Dollar Backbone of the AI Boom


CoreWeave, once a small player in crypto, is now a $19 billion unicorn that provides GPUs to AI developers. Its frenetic culture and rising competition now pose challenges, former employees say.

GPUs are needed to train and operate machine learning systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4 that analyze vast amounts of content, interpret prompts from users, and return eloquent writing or astonishing imagery. When startup Databricks recently trained an open source AI model designed to rival GPT-4, the project occupied 3,072 Nvidia H100 chips, which debuted last March, for three whole months, running up a cloud tab of $10 million. Raul Martynek, CEO of data center provider DataBank, estimates that companies like CoreWeave offering GPU access can have 70 percent gross profit margins by avoiding the costs of developing their own facilities from the dirt up.

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