The News
CoreWeave’s rocky market debut can be attributed to Wall Street’s lack of understanding of the business, CEO Michael Intrator said Friday.
“We are bringing a new business model to the market, and the validity of that model is being debated every day in the stock price by a lot of people who don’t have a ton of information or a track record with the company,” Intrator said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit.
Intrator doesn’t expect markets to fully understand the business for at least a few years, he said, adding that only then will investors be able to accurately value the company. Before entering the public market, it took private investors and lenders a year with CoreWeave to really get what the company does, why, and how to finance it, Intrator said.
CoreWeave rents out GPUs and other computing equipment to tech firms. It was the largest US tech IPO since 2021 amid a massive slump in the IPO market — and it had the attention of other AI companies eyeing a market entrance that were keen to determine how public markets are viewing the future of AI. CoreWeave’s stock fell shortly after launch and then recovered, now trading around its IPO price.
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Step Back
Wall Street’s trigger finger and limited understanding of AI affects all tech stocks, not just CoreWeave’s, Intrator said. The discrepancy between tech innovation and market response was on display when DeepSeek’s R1 model hit the market earlier this year: “I’ve never seen an experience where there was a severe dislocation with the interpretation of the financial market and the physical underlying infrastructure.” Wall Street flocked from AI stocks en masse. Meanwhile, “my phone blew up” with model-building companies asking how to build more infrastructure and faster, he said said.
Public market investors are “missing the thematic power of more compute, sooner — more powerful, larger fabrics at gargantuan scale,” he said.
Know More
CoreWeave recently inked a $12 billion deal to supply OpenAI with infrastructure, at a time when OpenAI is seeing explosive demand. After it launched its photo generation tool last month and Studio Ghibli-style images created using the model spread on social media, CEO Sam Altman posted on X that “our GPUs are melting.”
When asked what is going on in CoreWeave’s data centers, Intrator said, “If they’re melting GPUs, they’re melting GPUs in sub-optimal environments. We don’t melt GPUs.”
The Semafor View
Artificial general intelligence seems imminent, with increasingly capable robots coming along for the ride, but it remains unclear how increasingly powerful computers will impact the world’s knowledge workers. The billions of dollars companies are pouring into AI have not paid off, yet.