Throughout the past decade, AI has been driving what many consider to be the next industrial revolution—one that requires an entirely new kind of infrastructure.
Beneath the surface of prominent AI platforms, the AI boom is being driven by a race to build the cloud infrastructure to support these large models.
One company at the heart of this revolution is CoreWeave. Since its inception in 2017, CoreWeave initially focused on the cryptocurrency market but pivoted in 2019 to specialize in AI infrastructure. Since then, it has become a major player in this sector. With over 250,000 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) running today, the company has earned the title of the “AI Hyperscaler.”
The company’s goal is to fill the major gap in the market—traditional cloud systems simply aren’t built to handle AI applications.
“The cloud that was built for hosting websites, storing data lakes and running web apps is not the right engineering solution for the cloud that has to be built for running artificial intelligence—they’re very different types of workloads,” CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Development Officer Brannin McBee ‘04 said.
The massive processing power required for AI has created unprecedented demand for specialized cloud solutions.
“AI takes a lot of processing power,” Computer Science Department Chair Kurt Tholking said. “If you move that to the cloud, which is what CoreWeave was trying to do, then they can scale, share resources, implement those resources at a faster rate than you could if you had to go out and buy a server.”
The company recently secured an $11.9 billion contract with OpenAI and maintains long-standing partnerships with some of the world’s biggest industry leaders such as NVIDIA, Microsoft and IBM.
On March 28, CoreWeave launched its initial public offering (IPO), which raised $1.5 billion, making it the largest IPO of 2025. Currently, it is the only publicly traded company explicitly focused on cloud services for AI.
“Going public was an important step for us to service the demand profile of our clients,” McBee said. “To meet that demand, we needed more scalable ways of financing that demand, and you unlock different financing mechanisms as you move into the public markets.”
After graduating from St. Mark’s and earning a finance degree from the University of Colorado, McBee’s journey began as a proprietary trader in the hedge fund industry. His time as a trader served as a training ground where he sharpened both his technical skills and mentality, learning to confront his failures and grow from those experiences.
After a decade of hard work, he felt that he had achieved both the financial security and the confidence to bet on something bigger.
“Startups are hard when you’re underfunded,” McBee said. “Startups are hard when you don’t have something to fall back on. My startup would not have been successful if I hadn’t had a decade of very successful commodity trading. But I knew I could gamble a couple years on trying to make something work and then fall back on another career.”
Now, eight years after co-founding the company, McBee’s efforts have been pivotal in shaping CoreWeave’s growth. As Chief Development Officer, he’s responsible for raising capital — leading the IPO process, managing investments and closing major mergers and acquisitions.
Following a $213 million revenue jump from $16 million in 2022 to $229 million in 2023, CoreWeave followed it with over a 730 percent jump from $229 million in 2023 to $1.9 billion in 2024. Now, the company is racing to sustain its rapid expansion, with internal projections estimating that it could reach $8 billion this year.
“We’re taking on these massive industrial-age era projects yet again, but in an immensely short time frame,” McBee said. “It’s like saying ‘we need to build this giant railroad network in the next three to five years.’ That’s the scale of what we’re looking at.”
With the rise of more visible and powerful generative tools, the conversation has shifted from quiet integration to global transformation.
“With a technology that’s able to simultaneously disrupt and be integrated into nearly every sector on the planet, we’re talking about massive changes at every level,” McBee said.
As for the future of AI, the potential is limitless, as both students and professionals continue to adapt.
“(The demand for AI infrastructure) is definitely going to keep growing, maybe not at the rate it’s been growing the last couple of years as more and more companies have been adopting it,” Tholking said. “(People) have to look for ways to make themselves relevant and be able to work with AI.”
With CoreWeave at the forefront of the AI revolution, McBee’s ability to embrace failure has become one of his greatest strengths, a mindset that he credits to his time at St. Mark’s, where he first learned the value of critical thinking and resilience in overcoming challenges.
“St. Mark’s offered a unique level of autonomy—an ability to figure stuff out on your own,” McBee said. “For me, that sat less in direct classroom work, and it was actually more in the photography program because it encouraged failure. And that’s a really tough thing to teach in a strictly academic environment.”
Ultimately, he sees this mindset as the foundation of his success, one that will continue to propel CoreWeave to a bright future driving the AI revolution.
“The thing that has been most impactful for me is this concept around failing forward,” McBee said. “It’s a tough thing to teach, but it’s something that’s so important to get an early recognition of. People want to see that failure. They want to see that willingness to try something, to acknowledge that they were wrong, to fix what they were wrong about and to keep going forward. And I think that’s one of the more important fundamental aspects to the way that I’ve approached both my personal life and my public life.”
