From Crypto Bros to Cloud Czars: CoreWeave’s $10B Founder Is Laughing All the Way to the (Heavily Leveraged) Bank

CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator is now worth a jaw-dropping $10 billion just three months after the company’s underwhelming IPO.

The AI infrastructure firm raised $1.5 billion in its debut, falling far short of the founders’ $4 billion dream, yet its stock has since exploded nearly 300%.

CoreWeave supplies cloud services for AI training and inference using a hoarded stash of Nvidia GPUs, aided in part by Nvidia itself, which is both an investor and supplier.

The company counts OpenAI and Microsoft as customers, with OpenAI still on the hook for $11 billion worth of services.

Despite posting $985 million in Q1 revenue, CoreWeave recorded a $315 million net loss and revealed a staggering $8.8 billion in debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 15%.

Rather than using IPO proceeds to escape the debt loop, the company continues its GPU-backed borrowing spree to fund its ambitions.

Intrator and his co-founders started the business as a crypto-mining hustle in a closet after their hedge fund flopped, eventually scaling up to industrial-scale AI cloud infrastructure.

All three founders cashed out over $150 million apiece pre-IPO, ensuring their billionaire status wasn’t just on paper.

Now reportedly eyeing a rival acquisition, CoreWeave represents the AI gold rush in 2025: massive hype, massive losses, and even bigger paydays for those at the top.