When the AI frenzy created a chip shortage that left companies scrambling for computing power, a new type of cloud startups emerged to sell it to them.n 2017, CoreWeave’s cofounders unknowingly hit the jackpot. They’d amassed racks upon racks of an Nvidia chip for which there would be insatiable demand five years later, as artificial intelligence went mainstream.
So when the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 set off a land grab for those Nvidia chips which had become the crown jewel of AI model training, CoreWeave was fortuitously positioned. Having access to an abundance of “compute”— hardware that is used to process data and perform calculations — has become table stakes for anyone looking to meaningfully compete in the AI race.
Lambda, No. 84 on the Cloud 100, has also found success providing AI startups like video generation company Pika and enterprise startup Writer with the thing they need the most: massive clusters of chips. And other, smaller companies are tapping into the trend too, like unicorn startup Together AI, which is building an open-source infrastructure for generative AI model development.
By 2017, the company had transitioned to selling that hardware and found willing customers in academics doing machine learning research. That switch set Lambda up for the impending gold rush. Today, it’s valued at $1.5 billion and clocked some $250 million in revenue in 2023. “When ChatGPT came out, it was all about training. Every other company was trying to come up with a …model.