CoreWeave started as a group of commodity traders mining Ethereum with graphics cards in New Jersey. When crypto prices fell, they found a better use for the chips: renting them to anyone who needed heavy computing. Then ChatGPT arrived, and every AI lab wanted NVIDIA GPUs at once. CoreWeave had them. By March 2025 Microsoft was its biggest customer, and the company went public in the biggest U.S. tech IPO since 2021.

Atlantic Crypto Changes Course

Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, Brannin McBee and Peter Salanki founded the company in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto. It mined Ethereum with GPUs. In 2019 it renamed itself CoreWeave and began offering cloud computing on those chips. The bet was that a cloud built only for GPU work could beat the giant clouds on speed and price. CoreWeave borrowed heavily against its chips and contracts to build data centers fast.

A Cut-Down IPO, Then a Run

CoreWeave priced its IPO at $40 a share on March 27, 2025, below its planned range, and raised $1.5 billion instead of the $2.7 billion it first sought. It began trading on Nasdaq as CRWV the next day. The stock then soared. CoreWeave signed a contract with OpenAI worth about $12 billion and expanded deals with Meta. Its revenue backlog reached nearly $100 billion in 2026. CoreWeave still trades on Nasdaq.

Cover: Young Woman at a Loom, Suzuki Harunobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a woman at a loom (CoreWeave).