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In the words of our judges
“Mike has steered CoreWeave from its humble beginnings to a titan in cloud computing, outpacing rivals by powering the globe’s most advanced AI workloads with unparalleled specialized infrastructure.”
In 2017, when ChatGPT was five years away from kicking off the generative AI (GenAI) era, Mike Intrator not only understood the transformative potential of GenAI but recognized the industry-wide challenge it presented. Intrator saw that the coming AI boom would require specialized computing power, enormous processing capacity and instant high-level tech support that the infrastructure of 2017 simply couldn’t provide. To fill the void, he launched AI cloud computing startup CoreWeave.
Intrator and his cofounders took a graphics processing unit (GPU) investment used initially for crypto mining and repurposed the GPU capacity for high-performance computing. During a period of uncertainty for crypto, Intrator took a calculated risk by scaling up GPU capacity at the height of peak panic pricing.
That risk paid off in 2023, when demand for CoreWeave’s tech surged as leading global AI companies called on the company to create purpose-built ultra performance computing infrastructure to support the booming demand for GenAI. In response, employee headcount nearly quadrupled as CoreWeave sought to enable large language model deployment, genetic sequencing and pharmaceutical breakthroughs along with graphics and rendering, life sciences, real-time streaming and other applications. Today, CoreWeave is one of the fastest-growing companies powering the AI revolution and plays a central role in the integration of AI into everyday lives.
Understanding the relationship between computing power and energy consumption, Intrator and his team built a data center portfolio wherein 90% of its capacity runs on 100% renewable energy. They also are researching further means of offsetting the company’s carbon production. As new GenAI use cases arise to benefit not only the tech world but all of humanity, CoreWeave is sure to play an integral and growing role.