In a Monday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator described what makes his company different from peer Oracle.
“Oracle has its own set of products that they’re offering, and they are a formidable competitor,” Intrator said, explaining that CoreWeave competes with Oracle in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space. “From our position, we really believe that over time, what’s going to differentiate us from anyone else is the … software stack that drives the performance that we’re able to achieve on our infrastructure.”
According to Intrator, CoreWeave built its software stack from scratch and made decisions based on optimization. He also said the company is neither “trying to incorporate any legacy technology,” nor “incorporate any history of success or failure.”
CoreWeave announced Monday it intends to buy data infrastructure provider Core Scientific for approximately $9 billion. By close, CoreWeave was down over 3%, while Core Scientific plummeted more than 17%.
The deal means CoreWeave wouldn’t have to pay rent at a number of Core Scientific’s data center sites, and management said in a presentation it would eliminate $10 billion in future lease obligations. The acquisition would also swell CoreWeave’s access to power, giving the company ownership of 1.3 gigawatts of gross capacity across Core Scientific’s U.S. data center footprint.
Intrator said CoreWeave has been working with Core Scientific for a long time, and that the acquisition would create a larger company that’s “capable of building and extending the offerings that CoreWeave brings to the most demanding AI clients in the world.” He added that there is “broad-based demand” for the product, the infrastructure and the compute that drives AI.
“The market’s going to take some time to understand the extent of our business and the differentiation that’s associated with how we go about running the software that drives the infrastructure,” Intrator said.
