How to Build the Ultimate GPU Cloud to Power AI

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

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

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

Tracy, have you looked at Nvidia's stock chart lately? And by lately, I don't mean over the last two years. I mean just over the last two weeks or two months.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

I don't need to look at it, because everyone keeps talking about it. So I know what's happening.

Joe Weisenthal (0:28)

You know what I'm pretty happy about, can I just say? We did that episode two months ago with Stacey Raskin.

And we were like, what's up with Nvidia? I know it's at the center of the AI chips boom and whatever. And then we did that episode and it came out, and then a week later, they just knocked it out of the park.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

The stock took off.

Joe Weisenthal (0:49)

Yeah, so.

Tracy Alloway (0:50)

We were early.

Joe Weisenthal (0:51)

We were at least a good two weeks early on that one.

Tracy Alloway (0:55)

Hey, two weeks matters.

Joe Weisenthal (0:57)

I'll take it.

So clearly, something that we talked about this with Stacey, something that Nvidia has is everyone's trying to buy it. Everyone's trying to get it. But then it raises the next question of like, okay, but what is that market like? How do you buy a chip?

Tracy Alloway (1:12)

Yeah, how do you buy a chip? And then I guess what do you actually do with it once you have it? Because my impression is that for a lot of these AI applications, the way you use the chips, the way you set up the data centers is very, very different to what we've seen in the past. And I think also what Nvidia is doing now is kind of different, but maybe we can get into this with our guests. My impression is they're trying to create a sort of like holistic approach for customers where they provide not just the hardware, but also some services to go along with it.

Joe Weisenthal (1:45)

Yes, right. And like all the software, and Stacey talked about that with the CUDA ecosystem.

Tracy Alloway (1:50)

CUDA, that was it.

Joe Weisenthal (1:50)

How dominant that is.

But right, like what do you do with it? Like how do you get one? If like, what would we do Tracy, if a big palette of Nvidia chips wound up here?

Tracy Alloway (2:01)

Would we even? Joe, you wanna know a secret?

Joe Weisenthal (2:02)

Yeah.

Tracy Alloway (2:03)

My basement is filled with H100 chips.

Just got a pile of them. It came with the house.

Joe Weisenthal (2:08)

It was on that ship that was stuck on the Chesapeake, and instead of getting your couch, you got it.

Tracy Alloway (2:12)

I just got a palette of H100s.

Joe Weisenthal (2:15)

That would be, we're manifesting that into reality. So anyway, I like how this world works. Essentially like the trading and dealing of these like the hottest commodity in the world, right?

Which is these advanced chips from AI and how that works and who can get one. I still think is like a sort of mystery that we need to delve further into this question.

Tracy Alloway (2:38)

I agree. And there is also, there's a lot of excitement around it right now for the obvious reasons of everyone's really into generative AI and Nvidia stock is exploding as we already talked about.

But we're also seeing a lot of previous, I guess consumers of chips, like the crypto miners start to pivot into the space. And I'd be curious to see what they're doing in it as well. And how much of that is just, you know, desperation versus, versus a real business opportunity.

Joe Weisenthal (3:08)

And the video game market.

Tracy Alloway (3:09)

Yeah, oh, totally.

Joe Weisenthal (3:11)

Which was like the other thing is like for years, I thought of Nvidia as the video game company.

Tracy Alloway (3:15)

Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (3:15)

Because they had their logo on Xbox.

Tracy Alloway (3:17)

And how realistic is that pivot? What proportion of those types of chips can be used for AI now?

Joe Weisenthal (3:24)

Well, I'm very excited. We do have, I believe, the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Brannin McBee. He is the chief strategy officer and co-founder of CoreWeave, which is a specialized cloud services provider that's basically providing this sort of like high volume compute to AI type companies. They recently raised over $400 million have been in this space for a little while. So, Brannin, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.