Industry News
The NVLink between the Kremlin and Crypto Garages: Origins of AI Cloud Kingpins
Aug 14, 2025
Source: Quok.it
Written by Ahmed Abdellah
What’s the common thread between a Kremlin-acquired ghost, the most infamous collapse in crypto history, and a scrappy Bitcoin mining warehouse? They all power the ~$50 billion AI Infrastructure market. And most people have no idea.
Today, we’re taking a trip to the past: connecting the dots between war, crypto scandals, and hardware hustlers — all of whom now control a significant share of the GPUs powering the AI gold rush.
Voltage Park — Crypto Billionaire Handouts
Voltage Park’s story starts with a name that still makes crypto OGs flinch: Jed McCaleb. Jed founded Mt. Gox, a bitcoin exchange that became crypto’s most infamous bust (think FTX before FTX), and then went on to co-found Ripple and later Stellar. After cashing out and raking in billions from XRP alone, McCaleb set up the Navigation Fund, a nonprofit with deep pockets.
Shortly after its formation, the Navigation Fund seeded $500 million into Voltage Park— enough to send overvalued startups like Cluely and Series crying to their investors.
All jokes aside, Voltage Park is a for-profit subsidiary wholly owned by the Navigation fund. This means that all of Voltage Park’s profits are reinvested back into the nonprofit. I did some digging and confirmed that they were always incorporated as a for-profit organization.
Source: DCIS Delaware
The funny part is that the press didn’t seem to get the memo. Even a year later, news outlets were still referring to Voltage Park as a “nonprofit”. Maybe “nonprofit owns for-profit that runs $500M in AI hardware” just doesn’t hit the same. But hey, regardless of their intention, the branding blur worked. It made Voltage Park appear altruistic while they quietly became one of the largest GPU landlords on the planet.
At first, they were positioned as “democratizing access to AI compute.” But profit margins have a way of changing that. Voltage Park quickly became the bulk supplier for resellers like RunPod, Akash, and Vast.ai, who slapped on their Qemu markups and out-distributed them.
But unlike their parent organization, Voltage Park is done with the handouts. They’re now playing to win.
With the recent addition of Saurabh Giri as CPTO, Voltage Park is ready to cut out the middleman. Saurabh was previously the director of Amazon Bedrock: Amazon’s genAI platform. It's clear that they're looking to build their own developer platform and own the distribution layer.
If you’re one of the many marketplace relying on them, you’re in trouble.
CoreWeave — The Miners Who Became AI Moguls
CoreWeave’s origin story sounds like a Jersey Shore spin-off of Silicon Valley. It started as a crypto mining business running racks of gaming GPUs in warehouses, chasing Bitcoin and Ethereum highs. When ETH prices collapsed, they were left with warehouses full of expensive hardware. As you can see here by our very detailed technical analysis, we’ve managed to pinpoint the key signals that indicated this pivot.
Source: TradingView
Before the crash, we estimate that CoreWeave was likely generating around $6 million per month in revenue, with estimated profits of about $3 million/month, while electricity and operating costs were still manageable during 2017–early 2018.
But as Ethereum’s price plummeted from over $1,400 to below $120 by late 2018, mining economics completely flipped. By 2019, monthly mining revenue tanked 94% (assuming peak efficiency and non-volatile power costs). Margins dipped so low that entire racks were decommissioned, leaving hardware sitting idle.
CoreWeave’s GPU mining operations were brutally sensitive to market swings. But instead of liquidating and giving up, they pivoted towards emerging demand in machine learning and visual computing. CoreWeave focused on power users who didn’t need the throttling, virtualization, or price tag that came with AWS. So, their first clients became ML shops and Hollywood VFX studios looking to train models and spin up render farms. All while they continued to quietly develop their automation and orchestration tooling.
Then came 2022.
OpenAI released ChatGPT, and the CoreWeave went from operating four datacenters to 14. A year later, CoreWeave signed a deal with Microsoft and needed even more capital to grow their infrastructure. They didn’t have the cash, so they did the unexpected.
In 2023, they collateralized their Nvidia H100s — and secured $2.3 billion in debt financing. This was the first time anyone had used their H100s as collateral, but it wouldn’t be the last. Fast forward to their IPO in 2025, and CoreWeave earns the majority of its revenue from OpenAI and Microsoft. But what happened to that H100 collateral now that the GB200 hit the market?
Source: financecharts.com
Yikes. If this chart sends chills down your spine, you may want to grab a coat before we head east.
Nebius — The Ghost of Russia’s Google
Yandex was Russia’s Google. Actually, it was Russia’s Google + Uber + Amazon rolled into one. At its peak, Yandex had a market cap of $30 billion. It was the country’s largest tech and telecom giant, with Yandex N.V. operating as its international arm.
Then 2022 happened. The invasion of Ukraine triggered a sanctions tsunami and delisting threats from the Nasdaq. Overnight, Yandex could no longer operate as a single global entity without facing political and regulatory disaster. Two years later, Yandex sold off its Russian assets in 2024, severing ties with its Russian operations and laying the foundation for a new identity.
The company rebranded as Nebius Group, shifting its focus to AI cloud infrastructure. Arkady Volozh, the Yandex co-founder and former CEO, took charge after he was removed from the EU sanctions. He got off the sanctions list by using the magic words: “I condemn Russia”.
After a two-year pause, Nebius resumed trading on Nasdaq under the NBIS symbol in 2024. To the public market’s eye, a ticker change is significantly less exciting than a loud IPO. To those of you who haven’t yet bought into the AI Infrastructure hype, this is probably a good thing.
Despite it’s rocky past, Nebius is thriving. They own a major data center in Finland, GPU clusters in Kansas City and another in New Jersey. They also launched co-location facilities in Paris and Iceland. But Nebius isn’t just another GPU provider. They’re aiming to become vertically integrated — with heavy investments in both the software and application layers.
Unpublicized, Nebius actually serves as the parent company for Avride, an autonomous vehicles company; Toloka, which specializes in LLM data labeling; and TripleTen, an online coding bootcamp. It’s not like they’re hiding this, they just aren’t in the business of generating hype. And who needs PR hype when you’re stock is up ~200% over the past year?
Source: TradingView
Closing Thoughts
History’s full of empires built on strange origins. Voltage Park was handed the keys to a goldmine. CoreWeave bet it all on green and walked away richer. Nebius crawled out of a geopolitical divorce with a new name and a second chance. Different plays, same business.
It’s easy to dress these companies up as “democratizing compute,” but strip away the PR and you’ve got a few well-positioned players in an industry soon to be worth hundreds of billions. They didn’t all get here the same way, but now they’re competing head to head.
Will demand keep up? Only time will tell.
