The Crypto Miners Who Became the Backbone of the AI Era In 2017, two commodities traders whose hedge fund had just collapsed bought a stack of graphics cards on a whim, set up a mining rig in a New Jersey garage, and started producing Ethereum. Eight years later, their company went public at a $35 billion valuation, count Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic among their largest customers, and operate a contracted backlog of $66.8 billion. That company is CoreWeave, and its