With Nvidia’s Help, Revenue Surges at Smaller Cloud Providers

The demand for artificial intelligence chips is turning into a boom for several upstart cloud-server providers, thanks to the complicated politics of the tech industry.

Consider the case of one young cloud provider, CoreWeave. The company has received a generous allotment of the latest AI server chips from Nvidia, the dominant force behind ChatGPT and other AI apps, even though supply of those chips is limited. Nvidia has been diverting some of that supply away from the biggest cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, because those companies are developing their own AI chips and want to reduce their reliance on Nvidia.

That has been great news for CoreWeave, which in recent weeks was on pace to generate more than $600 million on an annual basis, according to two people with direct knowledge, after it generated about $25 million in revenue in 2022.