How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Neil Tewari of Magnetar Capital. This is a $22,000,000,000 alternative asset manager at the center of the AI compute build out. We talk about the financial innovation, depreciation of GPUs, and what's next in AI compute. Welcome. Thanks so much for doing this, Neil. Absolutely. You know, really happy to be here. So you are leading AI infrastructure at Magnetar. You're at the center of the build out, enabling it, financing it. For any of our listeners who haven't heard, can you just explain a little bit what Magnetar is? Sure. So Magnetar's been around for actually, this is our our twentieth year. We're an alternative asset manager, and that can mean a lot of different things. Mhmm. But we have three primary strategies. The first one is private credit. The second one is a venture strategy. And the third is more of a systematic or quantitative focused public strategy as well. And so, I think, you know, when when people look at us and and, you know, why are we here in this moment, especially on building out AI infrastructure, I think a lot of it has to do with kind of our unique lens on helping to build capital intensive businesses and using creative financing, whether it's venture or other structures with unique elements, and I think we're gonna talk a lot about that. But to build out, and and optimize the balance sheets for these capital intensive businesses. So I remember hearing about you guys originally. So you're the first investor, I think, we've ever had on podcast in which That's exciting. Thank you. I remember hearing about you and Magntar initially around I was like, who's this big owner of CoreWeave? Yeah. And also, you know, helping OpenAI with some of their early build outs. When did you guys first start looking at the problem and thinking about how to how to solve it? Yeah. So we actually, you know, stumbled across the the compute problem before it was compute. You know, we met, CoreWeave back in, 2021, and that was when they were actually transitioning from mining Ethereum into high performance compute. And at that time, it was using the GPU as a, you know, an instrument to mine cryptocurrencies And interestingly, that same instrument could be used for high performance computing applications. And the first one was visual effects, so think of things like movies, Marvel movies and things like that. And so, they were transitioning at that point between crypto mining into the first kind of, high performance compute use case, and this was all before AI. Mhmm. And so we made our first investment before the AI trade started, but we added a lot of optionality where, you know, we could envision a world where, the GPU could be used for a lot of different high performance kinda computing applications. I think, you know, AI was on the radar, machine learning …