It’s not every day that you come across a startup willing and able to challenge the Big Three cloud infrastructure providers, but as a new AI spring dawns, CoreWeave is taking a shot.

AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud have spent the last decade building out an incredible array of cloud computing services and enormous data centers designed to replicate nearly anything potential customers could have done on their own. CoreWeave, which started out as a cryptocurrency mining operation, is taking the exact opposite approach to cloud services: It is focused on delivering the raw ingredients for the generative AI boom at extremely competitive prices.

“When the Big Three are building a cloud region, they’re building to serve the hundreds of thousands or millions of what I would call generic use cases for their user base, and in those regions they may only have a small portion of capacity peeled off for GPU compute,” said Brian Venturo, chief technology officer at CoreWeave, in a recent interview. “What really should be a first-class workload in those environments is kind of merely like a capacity planning afterthought.”

The company — straight out of the New Jersey suburbs — has raised $371 million since pivoting to cloud GPU computing, including a $221 million round last month. That round was backed with money from Nvidia, which has struggled to keep up with demand for its GPUs as the AI hype train of 2023 generates unprecedented demand for its chips.

“Now we’re in a position (where) we’re building for some of the largest AI labs on the planet at scale, and other cloud providers just can’t do it as fast as we can,” Venturo said. “It’s been pretty wild.”

CUDA shoulda

Nvidia’s GPUs have been the engine for the two biggest tech booms of the last decade:  cryptocurrencies and AI.

Way back in 2007, the chip company had the foresight to develop the CUDA programming model to make it easier to write