“Violent change in supply demand.”
That’s how Coreweave (CRWV) CEO Michael Intrator feels about what’s happening in the AI boom, cutting through tech’s loudest debate in 2025.
The skeptics label today’s AI market as “circular,” arguing the flow of money between chip manufacturers, cloud providers, and AI startups as clear evidence of a bubble that’s feeding itself.
Intrator feels that categorization misses the point entirely. Many see the current setup as financial engineering. In reality, it’s just logistics.
At the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco, Intrator said that the ‘closed-loop cooperation’ among AI businesses is actually just a historic supply-chain shock.
Computing power is scarce, and so is energy, while infrastructure typically takes years to build.
In essence, it’s a natural response for companies to coordinate and avoid retreating into silos when demand surges.
That level of coordination may look uncomfortable to outsiders, but to operators in the system, it’s mostly just a matter of survival.
CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator says AI’s turmoil isn’t engineering, it’s a violent supply-chain shockPhoto by SOPA Images on Getty Images
At its core, CoreWeave is a specialist.
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It quickly became the go-to GPU-first cloud provider, tailor-made for AI businesses that need Nvidia(NVDA) compute now, instead of waiting for months.
That entails everything from purpose-built clusters, swifter networking, and tooling that’s optimized for training and running AI models at scale.
That’s why CoreWeave is called a “neocloud” giant.
So it isn’t competing head-on with Amazon Web Services, but instead it’s filling the gap when big hyperscalers run out of capacity as demand continues climbing.
Investors are rewarded for that focus.
For perspective, CoreWeave went public at $40 in March 2025, and its stock has since risen to the mid-$70s, approximately 90% above its IPO price.
CoreWeave isn’t alone.
Nebius Group has followed a similar path and ended up being the best-performing software stock, up nearly 229% year-to-date.
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It’s important to note that it didn’t rally on hype alone.
Nebius landed major hyperscaler-scale contracts that effectively reset its demand outlook, including a massive $17 billion deal with Microsoft and a $3 billion, five-year agreement with Meta Platforms (META).
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Growth followed.
Nebius posted triple-and even quadruple-digit year-over-year revenue gains, bumping its guidance, while giving momentum investors fresh fuel.
Intrator argues that much of the criticism around today’s AI market is unfounded.
At Fortune Brainstorm AI, he argued that AI computing is concentrated in the hands of a handful of players.
That’s not because of any deal-making moves, but because the infrastructure is incredibly tough to build.
In practical terms, only a few businesses have access to the most performant chips, energy, and data centers required to run them at scale.
That scarcity compels tech players to focus on coordination.
Intrator described it as,
Additionally, the constraint is not limited to servers.
Intrator recalled having a conversation with a mining executive who said that the pressure extends “two levels deeper,” into the copper and raw materials needed in expanding capacity.
Also, Intrator says that demand remains as relentless as ever, dismissing any talk of sluggishness in its top-line.
The fiercest takedown of the AI trade came from the ‘Big Short’ Michael Burry, famous for calling the 2008 financial crisis early, focusing on the numbers underneath the boom.
Related: Popular analyst sets bold 2026 price target on Nvidia stock
Burry’s first target is creative accounting.
He made the case that hyperscalers are stretching depreciation schedules for semiconductors and servers, making their earnings look a lot smoother.
Although it doesn’t alter cash flows, it can make margins appear more stable and valuations with lofty valuations easier to defend.
According to Schwab, the top 10 stocks account for nearly 40% of the S&P 500’s entire market cap (the top five are about 27%) as of late 2025.
Then there’s the circular financing issue.
Burry described give-and-take deals where the money’s simply bouncing between chipmakers, cloud specialists, and model builders, questioning the veracity of the current demand.
In one blunt line, he stated that,
How Burry escalated the critique in 2025:
September 30, 2025: Scion’s Q3 13F showed Burry swung big with massive put options on 5 million shares of Palantir (roughly $912 million notional) and 1 million shares of Nvidia (about $186.6 million notional).
October 27: Burry stated that he would liquidate positions and return capital to investors.
November 3–19: He continued to sharpen warnings around depreciation and “dealer-funded” AI demand.
Nvidia — CoreWeave: Nvidia placed a massive$6.3 billion cloud-capacity order while agreeing to buy any unsold capacity through 2032, backstopping CoreWeave’s GPU buildout.
OpenAI — CoreWeave: OpenAI’s initial agreement was worth nearly $11.9 billion, expanding total contract value to nearly $22.4 billion.
Google — Anthropic: Google added over $1 billion in fresh capital along with earlier investments, reinforcing Big Tech’s role.
Microsoft / Nvidia — Anthropic: Microsoft (up to $5 billion) and Nvidia (up to $10 billion) supplied capital as Anthropic committed to buying $30 billion of Azure compute.
Wall Street SPVs: A recent Reuters report revealed that Meta, Oracle, xAI, and others have shifted more than $120 billion of AI data-center spending into SPVs, keeping debt off their balance sheets.
AMD — OpenAI: OpenAI signed a major multi-year deal to deploy a massive 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs, making AMD a critical partner.
Related: Nvidia makes boldest move yet, and the fallout begins
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Dec 28, 2025, where it first appeared in the Technology section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.