By the time CoreWeave rang the Nasdaq bell in March, it had already become one of the most talked-about names in AI infrastructure. But its future still depended on someone else’s real estate.
Much of the company’s compute power ran inside data centers it didn’t own facilities operated by Core Scientific, a former crypto mining giant that had repositioned itself as a high-performance computing landlord. The arrangement worked for a while. CoreWeave got scale quickly. Core Scientific secured long-term leases. But as AI demand ballooned and infrastructure became the new battleground, th
