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Today on the podcast, we're talking about a multi billion dollar deal that is happening in the AI space, and that involves CoreWeave and OpenAI. Now, this is a fascinating combination and partnership that OpenAI has recently done. I'm going to be getting into all of that, why this might be frame the relationship of OpenAI and Microsoft and what Core Weave plans on doing with this, essentially, as they're positioning themselves for what is, you know, a lot of people are Saying is a $4 billion IPO coming up. So we're to get into all of this. Before we do, if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your company using AI tools or your career, level it up with AI tools, you need to join the AI Hustle school community. Every single week, I record exclusive content where I break down the tools, processes and systems that I use with AI to grow and scale my company. So I share exact numbers, I share exact workflows. Everything I can't share publicly is published on there. It's 19amonth. In the past, I had this at over a hundred dollars a month, but I've dropped the price. And if you're interested in locking in that $19 a price now, when I raise the price in the future, it won't be raised on you. So if you're interested, there's a link in the description to my school community called AI Hustle. I'd love to have you as a member. There's over 300 members that are all sharing what they're doing, getting great feedback. It's an amazing group. All right, let's get into what is going on. So OpenAI is pouring $12 billion into core core Weave. This is a colossal amount. I mean, if you remember, OpenAI originally took $10 billion from Microsoft a couple of years ago for like 50% of the company. And that was like, massive groundbreaking news. And now they're putting $12 billion into another company. So what exactly does Core Weave do? Why are they doing this? What's going on? This is actually a five year, $11.9 billion agreement, just a little bit shy of the $12 billion. But Core Weave is a GPU heavy cloud service provider, which essentially allows you to use GPUs on the cloud. So OpenAI could, you know, if they're trying to train a ton of AI models and they don't have enough GPUs, they don't have enough infrastructure, they could go and use something like Core Weave to help them do this. And this is really interesting and strategic because just recently, I Think like a week or two weeks ago, Sam Altman said we are running out of GPUs. We don't have enough GPUs. He said in the past months he's concerned that Elon Musk's XAI has access to more gpus than him. Because I think they kind of relied on like sharing with Tesla and SpaceX and they did some other like clever things to get a whole bunch of GPUs in there to train. And this is making OpenAI concerned. Like this is a, you know, a threat to their business. If other companies are able to get larger amounts of GPUs. So they're making big partnerships and beyond just making a partnership, they're directly investing into this company so that, you know, people know or so that they have access, I would assume to priority from Core Weave's GPU and their cloud service provider. Now what's interesting here is OpenAI is not the only competitor and up until now wasn't even their biggest customer. So before this actually happened, Microsoft accounted for about 62% of Core Weave's revenue. This is just last year, 2024. And what's incredible is that the revenue grew to $1.9 billion. That's about 8x what it was in 2023, which was 228 million. So this is obviously a massive deal. And Core Weave just filed to go public last week. So it hasn't priced or scheduled when it's going to go public or priced out exactly what it's going to go public at. People are speculating it's going to be a 4 billion dollar IPO. This is fascinating. And now this isn't a company that is just kind of come out of obscurity. They're backed by Nvidia. Nvidia owns about 6% of Core Weave and essentially this is a AI specific. So they really focus on AI cloud service provider. They have a network of about 32 data centers at this point. Now this is a company I've been talking about on the podcast for years because they keep raising these eye watering rounds of funding. They're definitely a massive player in the space and a lot of people are using them to help train their AI models. But they are currently operating over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs. Now if I remember correctly, this is similar to what you know, Grok AI has under management. I'm trying to remember if they have, I think they have 200,000. And so for one company to get their hands on this many is very Very impressive. And this is as of the end of this year. And then they, the thing that Core Reeb's doing is they're kind of just like renting them out. So people need them, they use them and it's just like usage based. So since then, Nvidia has added a bunch more GPUs since the end of last year, 2024 at 250. So I'm not sure the exact number now. But they've also added Nvidia latest product, which is Blackwell. And essentially what this does is it's just supporting the AI reasoning. It's kind of the newest product. So the issue here that everyone has been talking about is, okay, fantastic $1.9 billion 8x growth since like the year before. This is amazing. This is exactly what you want to see in a company. But the thing that really kind of scares investors is 62% of the revenue is coming from one customer, Microsoft. So for any reason Microsoft said, hey, look, we don't like the company or we found a better place or we're going to do this all in house. That's, you know, 62% of all their revenue they're down because of one customer walking away. So this is not good, right? That's there to be down to 38% of their revenue total. And then, yeah, not, not great at all. So what's really interesting is now we have OpenAI coming in and actually paying them this multi year deal, tons and tons of money, $12 billion over five years. So it's, you know, obviously not all at once. I feel like we see a bunch of these deals you, you know, when Amazon or AWS is investing in anthropic, they did it over multiple years. They want them to hit different benchmarks. There's like a bunch of different things. They don't just get it all at once. And partially this is because I would assume for OpenAI to get approval and financing for a deal like this, they don't have $12 billion cash in the bank. And so they're just like essentially borrowing money for this IOU based off of future growth projections that they have and those. I'm, I'm really curious what those future growth projections are, especially as OpenAI's has been recently talking about having this like $20,000 AI agent that they're going to be pumping out and a $10,000 and a $2,000 AI agent a month. So like a $20,000 a month AI agent that can do, you know, PhD research and all this other stuff. So what's really interesting is I'd be super curious what their financial projections are, what they think they can make and kind of what the terms of their debt or their financing they need in order to pay this money or what percentage they give in cash and et cetera, et cetera. So very interesting. Regardless, not only is OpenAI now going to have access to the same cloud that Microsoft has been using, but they also are going to actually have some ownership in this. And this is right, OpenAI, Microsoft have this sort of frame relationship. People are calling them frenemies. They say their relationship is deteriorating and this is because there's a bit of a competition going on. And OpenAI uses Microsoft and Microsoft Azure as their cloud provider. And if Microsoft is going and using CoreWeave to get access to more GPUs, presumably it's like OpenAI's. You could imagine it might even be getting access to Core weave through Microsoft so like it'll just go directly to it, which breaks down Microsoft's revenue, blah, blah, blah, blah. Makes a lot of sense. But you could imagine Microsoft isn't super happy about it. So Microsoft, of course big backer of OpenAI put a ton of money in and now, you know, there's, there's some shaky grounds because they're kind of competing directly. OpenAI competes directly for Microsoft's enterprise customers. Um, and back in January when they, when OpenAI announced their big Stargate AI infrastructure deal, they're that they're doing with like SoftBank and Oracle, Microsoft stopped being OpenAI's only cloud provider. They started working with Oracle and now they need more compute resources. Right. So they're saying they're out of GPUs and so this might be a great way around it. But this isn't just, you know, OpenAI getting under Microsoft skin and kind of cutting at their customers. Microsoft is, you know, developing the same things that OpenAI has. They're developing their own AI models and currently they're developing their own reasoning models just like OpenAI has. So like they're both very much competing with each other head to head, even though they're like friends and they have a great partnership. OpenAI went and hired Sam Altman's rival, Mustafa Sulaiman, because Mustafa Sullivan was running Inflection PI, which was a direct competitor to ChatGPT. They hired him to be the head of Microsoft AI and now is building Microsoft's own in house version of Chat GPT which is going to compete directly with them, especially with these new reasoning models they have coming up. So Core Weave is sort of a, you know, a chess move in all of this. And what's interesting about the company Core Weave is this was founded by a bunch of hedge fund guys. It actually started out as a crypto mining operation. So they were using all these to mine crypto. And then when AI came out, they're like, hey, well, why don't we just rent these out to people that are trying to train AI models? They have all this infrastructure, so it makes a lot of expenses, a lot of sense. But this is a very costly business to get into. So there's three co founders. And what's interesting is of all the money they've raised, they have already cashed out about $480 million worth of shares. So that's over $150 million each for the three co founders that they've pulled out. So they are doing quite well right now. And what's really astounding is that Core weave has about $7.9 billion of debt. Now, of course, this isn't just like a software company that needs to raise money to pay developers to make software or providers. This is a company that is building Data centers, buying GPUs. So $8 billion of debt on their books isn't astounding. I mean, that's just what it costs for what they've been able to build. They're hoping that this new IPO is going to make a ton of money, billions of dollars in new capital that essentially they're going to use to pay down a bunch of their debt. Debt, which I'm assuming with interest rates today is not. Yeah, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty painful, I would imagine, to make interest payments on $8 billion of debt if today's interest rates. So they're going to try to do an ipo, raise a bunch of money and pay down some of that debt, which is really fascinating. What's interesting is the three founders were at one point trying to use GPUs to, you know, create money mine crypto. And now they're apparently accomplishing this, except not necessarily with crypto, but they're renting them out and making money. You know, they're minting money with their GPUs. So it seems like they have accomplished their mission. I'll keep you up to date on everything going on with this is obviously a colossal deal. $12 billion to core. We've really excited to see where the IPO goes. I'll definitely be reporting on how much money they raise, what the pricing is what the schedule for this thing to come out and once it launches how the company is doing. Absolutely fascinating spot and very, very big company in the AI space. Thanks so much for tuning in. Make sure to join the AI Hustle school community if you want to learn how to use AI tools to boost your business and career. And also if you want to join an amazing community of people using AI to create side hustles, to grow their businesses and to grow their careers. Link is in the description. Hope that you have a fantastic rest of your day.
Podcast Summary: Joe Rogan Experience for AI
Episode: OpenAI Invests $12B into CoreWeave, Microsoft Shocked
Release Date: March 21, 2025
In this episode of the "Joe Rogan Experience for AI," the host delves into a monumental deal within the artificial intelligence sector: OpenAI's investment of nearly $12 billion into CoreWeave. This partnership not only marks a significant shift in the AI infrastructure landscape but also introduces new dynamics between industry giants OpenAI and Microsoft.
The host opens the discussion by highlighting the scale and significance of OpenAI's investment in CoreWeave. This strategic move underscores OpenAI's commitment to scaling its AI capabilities amidst growing competition and resource constraints.
This $11.9 billion agreement spans five years and positions CoreWeave as a pivotal player in AI infrastructure, especially given the rising demand for GPU resources essential for training advanced AI models.
CoreWeave has rapidly emerged as a critical GPU-heavy cloud service provider, catering specifically to the needs of AI development. The company boasts a robust infrastructure with approximately 32 data centers and operates over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of the end of 2024.
Originally founded by individuals from the hedge fund sector, CoreWeave transitioned from crypto mining to AI infrastructure as the market demands shifted. This strategic pivot has positioned them as a key enabler for AI companies requiring substantial computational power.
The investment comes amidst a nuanced and increasingly competitive relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft. Historically, Microsoft has been OpenAI's primary cloud provider, contributing to 62% of CoreWeave's revenue as of 2024. However, OpenAI's substantial investment in CoreWeave introduces a new layer of competition and collaboration.
This dynamic is further complicated by Microsoft developing its own AI models, directly competing with OpenAI's offerings. The collaboration through CoreWeave could lead to tension, especially if Microsoft's enterprise customers perceive a shift in their cloud infrastructure preferences.
CoreWeave's financial trajectory is both impressive and concerning. The company's revenue skyrocketed from $228 million in 2023 to $1.9 billion in 2024, marking an eightfold increase. However, this rapid growth is heavily reliant on a single client—Microsoft—which poses a significant risk.
With CoreWeave filing for an IPO estimated to be worth around $4 billion, there are expectations that the influx of capital will aid in reducing their substantial debt burden. The company's ability to manage this debt amidst high-interest rates will be crucial for its sustainable growth.
OpenAI's investment in CoreWeave is a strategic maneuver that has broad implications for the AI ecosystem. It ensures that OpenAI has prioritized access to cutting-edge GPU resources, which are vital for training and deploying sophisticated AI models. Additionally, this move could signal a shift in how AI companies secure and manage their computational needs, potentially leading to increased competition among cloud service providers tailored for AI workloads.
Moreover, the partnership exemplifies the intricate balance between collaboration and competition in the tech industry, especially as companies vie for dominance in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
The $12 billion investment by OpenAI into CoreWeave marks a pivotal moment in the AI industry's infrastructure development. It not only secures OpenAI's access to critical GPU resources but also introduces new competitive dynamics with Microsoft. As CoreWeave moves towards its IPO and seeks to stabilize its financial standing, the broader AI ecosystem will keenly watch the outcomes of this substantial investment.
This episode provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies involved in major AI infrastructure investments and the strategic decisions shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
For those interested in leveraging AI tools to grow their businesses or careers, the host recommends joining the AI Hustle School Community. This platform offers exclusive content, workflows, and a supportive network of over 300 members focused on harnessing AI for entrepreneurial success. The membership is available at $19 a month, with a limited-time offer to lock in this price before future increases.
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