CoreWeave Co-Founder on Sold-Out Compute and What the Market Gets Wrong about GPUs

**Zaid Admani** (0:00)
Welcome back to The Rundown, interview edition. Today, we are talking to Brannin McBee, the co-founder and chief development officer at CoreWeave. CoreWeave has become one of the biggest players in the AI cloud space. Business is booming right now, but so are questions about their business model. So in today's conversation, we get into it all. We talk about how CoreWeave makes money, how they differentiate themselves from the hyperscalers, why the company believes their debt load is manageable, how take or pay contracts work, and why older generation GPUs are holding up their value. This was a very interesting conversation. It got a bit nerdy and technical there in the middle, but I think you guys are gonna really enjoy it. So let's get into it.
All right, guys, today we are joined by Brannin McBee, the co-founder and chief development officer at CoreWeave. Brannin, welcome to The Rundown.

**Brannin McBee** (0:51)
Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity to join. Looking forward to it.

**Zaid Admani** (0:53)
Hey, I'm super excited for today's conversation. Before we really get into it, I don't want to rehash the CoreWeave origin story. I think a lot of people are familiar that the company pivoted from being a crypto miner to being an AI cloud provider. What I'm curious though is more about your role.
What does a chief development officer do?

**Brannin McBee** (1:11)
Yeah, it's one of those titles we like. What are you developing?
The development organization of what I run, it's capital origination, it's M&A, it's mid chips, right? So our group raises all the money for the business. So in these public market debt and equity transactions that you see, we run M&A processes for the business and then we have a group that does direct into company venture investing as well. It's a group that's dominated by ex-private equity, private credit, investment banking guys. We're pretty much fully based in New York. We qualified as a pretty small strategic team that just goes and gets shit done.

**Zaid Admani** (1:55)
I love it, I love it. I'm kind of curious, you guys are at the forefront of AI infrastructure right now, spending billions of dollars in the process. I mean, just high level, what do you think is the hardest part right now for the company? Is it just getting the chips, building the physical shells of the data centers, getting the power, the labor, the financing? Like what's the hardest part right now?

**Brannin McBee** (2:14)
Yeah, yeah, and it's funny that has evolved over time. Right at the very beginning, it was absolutely getting the chips and the allocation. I'm talking like 2021, 2022 time line, like very early days as we were scaling the cloud. Then it became financing the business, right? Like you have all this intense demand for products and that demand was really scaling quickly back in those days. But how do you go finance? And I'm sure we'll get into the financing of the business a little bit later, but we provided and created these very innovative strategies and market to get that financing together to provide the growth vehicle for the business. Where is it today?
Today, it really sits on just getting access to more powered shell, right? And powered shell we qualify as the data center itself. As you guys know, we predominantly lease data centers. We have some self-development as well. But the reason why I'd say it's so hard today is because what we have access to now, we had to predict how much we needed two years ago, right? Like you can't buy and get access to these leases in a spot basis, right? Like 2026, sold out. Can't find any more leases out there. 2027, pretty much gone at this point, right? Like there's nothing there. Like 2028, very competitive. And I'm talking, you know, it wasn't US based deployment, but for getting access to incremental data center space that will be online so that we can move our infrastructure and our software technology into those sites.
That's a tough thing to predict into the future. And I mean, I remember two years ago when we were planning for 2027, we were like, man, this is a lot of capacity. Like, is this right? And we were getting all the right signals from our client base that I think has evolved pretty materially from two years ago as well to keep growing, keep growing quickly. But if you had an extra 100 megawatts, extra 500 megawatts, whatever that number is today, it's gone in an instant.

**Zaid Admani** (4:25)
It's just so funny you say that because I remember two years ago when the capex numbers really started going up across the board and everyone started freaking out about it. What's funny is that everyone still didn't invest enough because there still isn't enough compute because I think everyone was so worried about overbuilding at the time.