By Andy Serwer
CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator is not your typical tech company executive -- but then again, CoreWeave isn't your typical tech company.
Intrator is an unapologetic creature of Wall Street, and the company he leads, which provides cloud-computing capacity for AI hyperscalers like OpenAI and Meta, reflects that to a degree.
"I come from a commodities background," Intrator told me in a recent interview. "I understand finance, and I understand structured finance and project finance. That's where a lot of the DNA is for myself and for some of the founders."
CoreWeave runs massive data centers, such as its massive 450,000-square-foot facility in Plano, Texas, for Nvidia. Those sites are powered by Nvidia chips or graphics processing units, which are essentially optimized, enhanced, and customized with layers of CoreWeave's sophisticated software.
"There is enormous technical expertise within the company," Intrator said. To finance these centers and the purchase of Nvidia's GPUs -- both of which carry hefty price tags -- Intrator and CoreWeave have turned to some innovative financing techniques that were previously completely alien to Silicon Valley.
Step one: simply tapping into the debt markets in a meaningful way. Intrator explained why tech companies hadn't done so before.
"[Silicon Valley companies have] never needed to use their balance sheet[s], because the technology that they're building is so transformational, so powerful, that they throw off enough cash that they can finance their entire business through equity," Intrator said. "It's actually incredibly inefficient, but because it's so world-changing, they're able to do it. It's like, sub-optimal from my seat, or from the seat of, let's say, a finance professor who was looking at the problem."
But when it comes to financing capital-intensive GPUs and data centers, debt is a must, Intrator suggests.
"The way that you build infrastructure is using the debt markets," he said. "And the debt markets view the world differently. The debt markets, which I refer to as East Coast capital, as opposed to West Coast capital [or equity], really has only one rule, which is, 'Pay me my goddamn money back.'"
CoreWeave certainly has money to repay, with some $10.3 billion in long-term debt obligations and $310 million of interest expenses in its latest third quarter-report alone.
The big Silicon Valley hyperscalers are now borrowing a page from CoreWeave's playbook, by well, borrowing. U.S. tech companies issued a record $341.8 billion in debt last year ($30 billion from Meta, $25 billion from Alphabet, $15 billion from Amazon) -- some ten times a typical year prior.
"They really copied this from us," a CoreWeave executive told me, speaking of these debt financings. "We are really proud to be an East Coast tech company," this person added. (The company is based in Livingston, N.J., a suburb of New York about 25 miles west of the city.)
CoreWeave introduced another groundbreaking financial move: Using Nvidia's GPUs -- the precious engines of the AI economy which can cost $30,000 or more apiece -- as collateral to raise money on Wall Street. CoreWeave first did so through a $2.3 billion debt facility financing in August 2023 which was led by hedge fund Magnetar Capital and Blackstone.
CoreWeave's origin story is singular. Founded in 2017 by Intrator and several other commodity traders, the company began life as Atlantic Crypto, which used Nvidia GPUs to mine the cryptocurrency Ethereum. The crypto crash of 2018 left the company without a viable business model but with a sizable inventory of pricey GPUs, so the team pivoted, as they say, by changing the company's name to CoreWeave and began to offer up cloud computing capacity and services to tech companies.
As business gradually grew in the early 2020s, CoreWeave bought more and more GPUs -- including $100 million worth of inventory in summer 2022 -- which deepened its ties with Nvidia. In November of that year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence business exploded -- with CoreWeave perfectly positioned to benefit.
Intrator, a serious sort with a sly sense of humor, is a Brooklyn native with a bachelors in political science from SUNY Binghamton and an M.P.A. from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs focusing on environmental policy. He worked from 1998 to 2014 at Natsource Asset Management, where he oversaw investments in global environmental markets and carbon transactions. After that, he served as CEO of Hudson Ridge Asset Management, a natural gas hedge fund, until it closed in 2018. Today, Intrator is one of CoreWeave's largest shareholders; he owns some 10% of the company worth some $5 billion.
Another large CoreWeave shareholder is Magnetar, which is led by managing partner Daniel Snyderman and has a 14% stake in the company. Even before Magnetar led GPU-secured debt financings for CoreWeave, it invested hundreds of millions of dollars in CoreWeave's equity fund-raising rounds from 2021 to its IPO last year, investments which are now worth tens of billions of dollars of CoreWeave's equity.
Recently, Magnetar pared its holdings of CoreWeave stock by engaging in some sophisticated prepaid forward-sale contracts which allows it to receive cash upfront, but retain voting rights on those shares until June.
Another indication that CoreWave seeks to straddle the worlds of Wall Street and Silicon Valley: Adding Glenn Hutchins to its board of directors in 2025. Hutchins co-founded private equity giant Silver Lake Partners, which was a pioneer in bringing sophisticated Wall Street know-how and financing to tech company deals.
There are plenty of CoreWeave doubters out there on Wall Street who are concerned about the company's leverage, its use of GPUs as collateral, and the fact that AI might be a bubble. There are also questions about the so-called circular financing -- where companies invest in each other and/or are suppliers and customers to one another -- in which CoreWeave and others are engaged.
Intrator shakes his head at all that. As for the circular financing specifically, Intrator says he was talking recently to the CEO of a copper mining company who spoke of supply challenges in that business and working with peer companies to alleviate those problems. "I said, 'That's a great idea, but if I say that, man, it's going to get ugly,'" he told me. "We're trying to build infrastructure at a pace the world has never seen before. I cannot deliver enough compute. Nobody can get enough infrastructure."
Nvidia doesn't seem to have any issues with CoreWeave or its relationship with the company. Earlier this week, Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave -- and expanded its access to CoreWeave's software, as well.
Why should people buy CoreWeave shares now, I asked Intrator? "We have built a business that delivers enormous value, and I think that's a good place to allocate money," he said. "It's how I allocate money to other things. I think this is where there is value. On a risk-adjusted basis, there's value."
Value may indeed exist there -- though perhaps of the atypical variety.
Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 31, 2026 01:00 ET (06:00 GMT)
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