How CoreWeave Sees the Market for Compute Right Now
When we last spoke to Brannin McBee, the co-founder and chief development officer of cloud company CoreWeave, his business was not yet public and sourcing GPUs was a key constraint on growth. But three years later, things look pretty different. CoreWeave IPOed and has been raising money in the bond market too, as well as signing more deals with chipmaker Nvidia. In fact, investors have basically been throwing money at all-things-AI. But there are persistent bottlenecks to further growth. Chip supply is still scarce, but so are transformers and electricity. In this episode, we catch up with Brannin on everything he's seeing in the market for compute right now, including leases, Nvidia's new Vera Rubin systems, demand for training versus inference, and the possibility of standardizing the market for compute.
Read more:Trump Officials Worry US Loophole Let Chinese Firms Buy Nvidia Blackwell ChipsBroadcom Slides Most Since January 2025 on AI Outlook Miss
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CoreWeave’s Brannin McBee on the future of AI infrastructure, GPU economics, & data centers | E1925
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Todays show:
Brannin McBee joins Jason to discuss CoreWeave’s transition from cryptocurrency to AI (3:36), the energy dynamics of GPUs (14:04), innovations in data center cooling (19:28), and the future challenges and impacts of AI infrastructure on industries like search, advertising, and e-commerce (45:36).
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(3:36) The founding story of CoreWeave and the transition from the cryptocurrency market to AI
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(14:04) Energy reliance of GPUs, the future of data centers, and the cost and efficiency of GPU cloud infrastructure
(19:28) Direct-to-chip liquid cooling and other cooling solutions for GPUs
(24:52) Demand trends for GPU capacity and the growth of inference linked to user growth
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(30:28) LPUs Vs. GPUs
(34:13) Dominance of Nvidia in training models, implications of open source chips and chip architecture
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(40:00) Challenges in training large language models and the use of infrastructure as a weapon by big tech
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(52:46) Timeline for supply-demand balance in AI infrastructure and the operational feat of running multiple data centers
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How to Build the Ultimate GPU Cloud to Power AI
Artificial Intelligence is all the rage right now and most of the investor excitement has so far been focused on the companies providing the hardware and computing power to actually run this new technology. So how does it all work and what does it actually take to run these complex models? On this episode, we speak with Brannin McBee, co-founder of CoreWeave, which provides cloud computing services based on GPUs, the type of chips pioneered by Nvidia and which have now become immensely popular for generative AI. He walks us through the infrastructure involved in powering AI, how difficult it is to get chips right now, who has them, and how the landscape might change in the future.
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