CoreWeave, founded in 2017 by three former commodities traders as a cryptocurrency mining business under the name Atlantic Crypto, pivoted from struggling crypto mining into a major AI infrastructure provider. The company began in New Jersey, investing heavily in GPU-powered infrastructure during the crypto boom. In 2018, cryptocurrency markets crashed, with Bitcoin losing roughly 80% of its value from its peak, collapsing mining profitability. Instead of waiting for recovery, the founders asked what else the GPUs could do, recognizing that researchers training machine learning models required the same high-performance GPUs. This pivot led CoreWeave to sign contracts worth tens of billions of dollars with some of the biggest technology companies, transforming it into one of the world’s most important AI infrastructure providers.