Data Centers, Crypto Miners, and Gamers Are All Battling for Semiconductors

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Unfortunately, my colleague Tracy Alloway, she is off today and is particularly unfortunate because this is gonna be a big one. So, you know, like on this podcast, obviously we talk about chips a lot. And I think now we've done like eight different episodes on semiconductors and who makes them and the shortages and the challenges of building them and so forth. So Odd Lots listeners will know that. We also do a fair number of episodes about cryptocurrencies. And of course, that's for obvious reasons why cryptocurrencies have been going up a lot and it's a fascinating area. Well, this episode, I actually am gonna say it actually combines the two because it's slowly becoming clear that you can't really talk about the semiconductor market right now without talking about cryptocurrencies because you need chips to mine them. And when the cryptocurrency market is booming, people want to acquire more chips to mine them. And it's becoming a sort of more significant source of demand. If you look in the video gamer community, there's a huge frustration about their inability to buy various graphics cards from the likes of Nvidia because Ethereum miners snapped them up.

Recently, there have been stories out of Asia, China in particular, where people are buying hard drives because they want to mine the new cryptocurrency, Chia. Bitcoin is mined using specialized chips, but ultimately that takes a chip production capacity too. So really the stories are interlocked, I think, in a way that I hadn't up until recently fully appreciated. And I would not say that crypto is the main source of reason why there is a shortage or difficulty in getting semiconductors, but everything matters at the margin. And so we're gonna explore this nexus today between what is going on in the world of semiconductors, the fight to acquire semiconductors between different players, because you have the miners, you have the gamers, people use computers, you have data centers, which of course have tremendous chip needs, and they're all fighting it out for this semiconductor capacity.

And it all comes together and it's a really fascinating facet of all of these different stories brought together. I'm very excited about this episode.

I am going to be speaking with Brian Venturo. He is the CTO and co-founder of CoreWeave, which is a cloud computing company. And we'll get into the details of specifically what they do. But as a cloud computing company, of course it specifically has a lot of chip needs itself. And so he's gonna walk us through what the world looks like right now. But he's also in the Ethereum mining space, sees it from all the different angles. We're gonna talk about that. So Brian, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Brian Venturo (3:10)

Thank you so much for having me. This is a topic that I am near and unfortunately dear to.

So really excited to dig into it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:18)

So why don't you just get us started? I mean, cloud computing, people think of Amazon, AWS, people think of Microsoft perhaps, but obviously they're not the only players.

What is CoreWeave and how is it situated within the cloud computing ecosystem?

Brian Venturo (3:35)

We typically talk about ourselves as a specialized cloud. So we're primarily providing highly scalable, highly parallelizable burst compute to companies that are in the VFX production and rendering space.

Joe Weisenthal (3:50)

That's VFX, that's video graphics.

Brian Venturo (3:52)

Yeah, correct. So pretty much anything that you see that's episodic on a streaming channel or that's being produced in long-form content, like that's being touched by a VFX artist somewhere, whether it's on the compositing layer or if it's actually on the computer generated graphics layer, that stuff needs a significant amount of compute. And that's one of our focus areas as a business. So we're there for them. And then in addition to that, it's AI machine learning. So it's model training and serving.

There's one additional one that kind of sits between the media and entertainment space and the batch processing space, which is called Pixel Streaming, which is serving real time experiences in your browser.

Joe Weisenthal (4:31)

Right.

Brian Venturo (4:32)

Right, so if you ever go to configure a car online, they don't have 700 million versions of that car rendered. They actually do it in real time on a GPU somewhere in the data center. And then the last piece is kind of the legacy HPC, right? So it's highly parallelizable batch processing. It's people who are doing drug discovery, if they're doing cancer research, kind of everything under the sun.