Brannin McBee is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CoreWeave.

A few years ago, he and a few friends started buying hardware to mine cryptocurrency. It turns out, the same hardware -- chips known as GPUs -- is essential for running state-of-the-art AI models. Today, Brannin and his friends have turned their hobby into a company that’s competing against some of the biggest companies in the world to provide the hardware and computing power to run AI.