Addressing one of the most persistent critiques of the current artificial intelligence boom, CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator pushed back against the narrative of a “circular AI economy” in an appearance at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco.
While skeptics often point to the tangled web of investments between chipmakers, cloud providers, and AI startups as a financial bubble, he argued that deep industry collaboration is the only viable response to a historic supply chain crisis.
Circular is “the incorrect way of looking at it,” Intrator told Fortune Editorial Director Andrew Nusca, reframing the dynamic not as financial engineering, but as logistical necessity. “It’s a lot of companies working to address an imbalance that is distorting the globe.”
The concept of the “circular economy” in AI suggests that revenue is merely being recycled between a handful of tech giants—such as Nvidia investing in CoreWeave, which in turn uses that capital to buy Nvidia chips. However, Intrator described the market conditions as a “violent change in supply demand,” adding that the only way to navigate such volatility is “by working together.”
The ‘physical bottleneck‘
