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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nelie Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

So a lot of people think AI is a bubble.

A lot of people, including people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who keeps running around telling everyone that he thinks AI is a bubble, all the while raising and spending enormous

amounts of money and seem like bubble indicators to everyone else.

This is all pretty confusing.

So we set Verge senior reporter Liz Lapato out to report

on this supposed AI bubble, whether it's real, how it might pop, and what all this might mean.

And she's joining the show today to talk about one particular company that sits right in the middle

of all of it. That company is called CoreWeave, and Liz has spent considerable time digging into its history,

its financials, and the truly fascinating story that all of it tells us about the modern AI boom.

Liz actually has a big story about Corweave running next week on The Verge.

So if you want even more detail after you listen to this episode, just stay tuned for that.

But to me, the basics of the Corweave story are themselves fascinating.

Corweave was founded by former commodities traders as an Ethereum mining firm out in New Jersey.

In crypto.

Like so much of the tech industry, when crypto sputtered,

Corweave pivoted to AI and started to use the same GPU as it was stockpiling to mine Ethereum to build its own

data center operation. Corweave's big innovation is creative financing. It raises huge amounts

of money to build data centers full of the Vivided GPUs and then leases those GPUs back

...