CoreWeave (CRWV.US) CEO Downplays Regulatory and High Interest Rate Concerns, Says AI Infrastructure Demand Remains Strong

AI cloud computing infrastructure provider CoreWeave (CRWV.US) CEO Mike Intrator said on Wednesday that the company has not seen order demand slow despite growing regulatory hurdles for data center construction. He believes such restrictions will only change where AI infrastructure is built, not weaken overall market demand. "There has been absolutely no reduction in orders whatsoever," Intrator said in an interview. "These restrictions will not reduce demand in any way. The market is still seeking more infrastructure... The only question is where to build it." Intrator's remarks came as CoreWeave is holding its Fully Connected conference in San Francisco, where it announced a series of product and customer developments, including the launch of NVIDIA Corporation's latest Vera Rubin NVL72 system and the introduction of CoreWeave Forge, a new platform for AI model and agent development. U.S. stocks strengthened broadly on Wednesday, driven by lower-than-expected U.S. PCE inflation data, with CoreWeave shares rising more than 1% in early trading. Stocktwits data showed that retail investor sentiment toward CoreWeave was in "bullish" territory over the past day. NVIDIA Corporation Vera Rubin System Enters Production CoreWeave announced that Cognition, the company behind AI coding agent Devin, became the first customer to run production workloads on NVIDIA Corporation's Vera Rubin NVL72 architecture. Intrator said NVIDIA Corporation's deeper integration of GPU and CPU architectures is an important development. When both types of computing components operate together within the same server, it is expected to deliver significant performance gains. CoreWeave's partnership with NVIDIA Corporation dates back to the Volta GPU architecture in 2017. CoreWeave said its software stack allows customers to continue running workloads across multiple GPU generations while adopting new NVIDIA Corporation systems, reducing migration difficulty during infrastructure upgrades. NVIDIA Corporation shares rose more than 2% at one point in early trading Wednesday, just about $5 away from a record high. Earlier in the day, NVIDIA Corporation also announced a three-year software partnership with engineering consulting firm Jacobs. CEO Downplays High Interest Rate Impact, Bullish on Improving AI Infrastructure Profitability Regarding concerns that rising interest rates could weaken returns on AI infrastructure investment, Intrator said CoreWeave's margins are improving faster than rates are rising. "We are getting margin expansion faster than rates are rising," he said, noting that the profitability of newly added infrastructure is already higher than a year ago. Intrator expects this trend to continue through 2027 and into early 2028. He attributed this to sustained demand for AI services from enterprises and consumers, as well as companies deploying AI infrastructure generating increasing revenue. His remarks also addressed recent market concerns about the sustainability of massive capital expenditures on AI data centers. As interest rates rise, data center financing costs increase accordingly, and CoreWeave itself is a capital-intensive company, so whether AI infrastructure can generate sufficiently high returns has been a focus for investors. Agentic AI Drives Simultaneous CPU Demand Growth Beyond continued strong GPU demand, Intrator believes a new CPU demand cycle is also forming. He said the rapid development of agentic AI is driving "comprehensive and significant CPU demand," not only from CPUs used alongside GPUs within GPU servers, but also from standalone CPU systems. As AI applications gradually shift from pure large model training and inference to agents capable of autonomously executing complex tasks, the related computing work often requires GPUs and CPUs to work in coordination. This means the AI infrastructure investment boom could benefit not only GPUs but also further expand demand for traditional processors and server systems. Launching Forge Platform to Streamline AI Model and Agent Development CoreWeave also released its new AI development platform Forge on the same day, aimed at integrating model and agent development, evaluation, observability, and deployment into a unified environment. Forge integrates CoreWeave's own services, Weights & Biases Models, OpenPipe's model post-training capabilities, and the open-source Notebook project marimo, enabling developers to complete multiple stages from AI model development to actual deployment on a single platform. CoreWeave said MasterClass and Canva have already begun using Forge. CoreWeave shares have risen about 22% year-to-date. As the market continues to debate whether AI capital expenditures can sustain rapid growth, Intrator's latest remarks suggest that, at least based on CoreWeave's current order situation, data center construction restrictions and rising financing costs have not yet had a significant impact on AI infrastructure demand.