YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Tiwari

lines on the record: 46
first: 2026-02-26
most recent: 2026-02-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There are a number of applications that on paper sound really interesting like oh, AI could just rebuild Slack or you could rebuild Salesforce or could rebuild X, Y, and Z. I think it's not just the product, it's the way that's integrated across multiple services and systems across the enterprise that is a lot more difficult to just replicate. Than I think some of the public markets are kind of reacting to.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the past. And so free cash flow margins have steadily increased significantly for SaaS as a whole over the last four or five years. And revenue multiples have stayed the same or gone down. And so to me, that's a bit of an exaggeration because it really has to do with individual names versus sectors. And I think that's kind of at least my take is like in all of these sectors, there are individual names that will learn how to maximize their value using AI. And there's those that won't. But what's happening right now is there's a hammer being hit across all names and not specific individual names that might not be using it as well. And then the second point, at least my view is.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think what you're seeing, at least, is at least my view, what I saw was towards the tail end of 2025 and into 2026, like there was, at least in my view, a big step up in performance of usable AI. And I think what Anthropic was doing really and Claude and like we use it all, obviously we use all the models, but there was a definite step up in performance in making AI usable and seeing that it can truly disrupt these non-AI native industries. I think the reaction and rotation out of each of these names is a bit much because when you, I think there's two factors I look at. One is when you look at valuations as an example, I think from a free cash flow perspective, SaaS companies are valued at the lowest they've been in years. And there's a huge margin difference between what those rev multiples are today and what they've been”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting to see that every day there's another industry that kind of tanks, whether it's you saw the wealth advisors tank for a few days, you saw the consultant companies, you saw real estate payments, real estate, right?”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think the natural kind of extension of what we see is what happened in the compute markets where you really needed flexible capital, where it wasn't just equity, it was debt and a variety of project finance to really scale CapEx, you're going to see that same kind of need in physical AI. And it simply has to do with capital intensity. On the compute side for like Coreweave as an example, they needed billions of capital to scale that cloud. And I think whether it's a robotics company or whether it's a manufacturing focused company, drones, defense, all of these areas are incredibly capital intensive. And then now that you add AI into them, I think it can help them scale faster, quite frankly. And capital intensity is still there. And so there's a moment in time now where you have to really look at optimizing balance sheets for physical AI to really.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compute and everything we saw starting in 2021 is asset heavy. That's where you started hearing a lot more about us. And I think physical AI is actually an extension of that. And so what you're seeing is part of the reason”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And, you know, maybe I'll just take a second to say one of the things that we observed from 2010 to like, you know, the early 2020s was we were in a very capital asset-like mode of build. Like SaaS was, you never heard Magnetar and SaaS, right? Because it was just purely asset life.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what are the cybersecurity kind of implications of environments for that? And so those are the two nuances, I think, with sovereigns is they need to find players that can rapidly scale compute in their countries. And oftentimes they don't necessarily have these players that know how to build and scale GPU compute. And I think that's a great place for the United States to lean in and help build sovereign ecosystems around the world. And then there's a matter of cybersecurity and how do you make it into a truly safe ecosystem for those sovereigns. So I think there's a lot of work to do still on the cyber side, especially as you look at scaling sovereign AI.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. You know, you saw the news from India last week. Obviously, a lot of the news in the Mideast, Southeast Asia. I think we're continuing to see that sovereigns view compute in AI, and even we do here in the United States as a matter of national security. And obviously, the funding of those clusters is very different than funding like a private cluster. And so you've got government capital that can be used for that. So I think there's two things that I find interesting in that space. I think one is who are the partners that are going to build that capacity?”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pieces of technology together to make that site usable. And so I think a lot of what's being looked at and a lot of what I'm looking at right now is really on the bring your own capacity, at least in the short term.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't get enough steel. This is not something I was aware of. You can't get steel. You can't get enough electricians to build out the power infrastructure, substations, transformers, air chillers. These are very specific power infrastructure needed to just get to a point where you can start to build a powered shell on a piece of land. And so the bottlenecks in the short term really are people, equipment. And then the other interesting thing is that on the generation side, what you're saying is regulatory obviously is a big challenge. And so there's a combination of bring your own capacity. There's a lot of that that's interesting right now. And so a site that can potentially grow to 500 megawatts might start with only 10 megawatts of grid interconnect. But can you add solar, net gas, turbines, put these various, bring your own capacity kind of.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We made an investment in a company called Tourists. I think I mentioned to you, which is building this distributed utility layer, almost like this mesh infrastructure to store excess capacity or store capacity from a variety of sources and then distribute it at the time when it's needed. And so I think that's kind of a critical layer that needs to be built. And then longer term, there is a generation problem, but I think in the shorter term, it's more on the distribution and storage. The other piece I would say is the true bottleneck, at least in the short term, the next six to 12 months is incredibly, I don't want to use the word simplistic, but it's things like structural steel. It's finding electricians that can build.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can't generate, yeah. I think there's actually quite a bit of stranded power across the grid, across the country. And what I mean by that is, you know, a lot of the utilities are built in a way where they're focused on peak power, right? So they've got natural gas peakers and they're focused on providing peak power for those moments where demand is kind of off the charts. And that's obviously only for a few days out of the year. So there's lots of generating assets out there. The question is they're a bit stranded, right? And so there's kind of, I look at the power problems being kind of multiple fold. The first one is how can you take the power we have on the grid and actually make it usable? And a lot of that has to do with flexibility and storage. And so we've been spending a lot of time looking at the energy storage business and distribution. How can you store unused capacity, peak demand shave capacity, store it, and then distribute it when it's needed?”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the last year, I've been spending a ton of time in the power and energy markets and looking at interesting solutions that can help scale power for the gap that we see. I think a few observations that we've seen. The first is we do have a power problem, but I think it's a bit more nuanced than a lot of the reporting out there where we can.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And building AI factories behind corporates and AI companies. And maybe the way I unpack that is you've got kind of more large monolithic cloud players, the hyperscalers and the neoclouds that are building large scale cloud environments. And a lot of where I think NVIDIA and others see this going is, yes, those are going to be important components and those are going to be huge markets, but corporates, Fortune, 500 AI companies that use a ton of compute will want dedicated AI factories associated with workloads that they run and that they have control over. And so I think you're starting to see the early indications of how do you finance and build out, almost think of like literally AI factories that sit on-prem with the company that can operate their workloads. You're talking about”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not offer that reliability. Right. And the other thing that's interesting is this was additional reporting from last week. If you're familiar with silicon data, they put together a lot of data on spot pricing and price per token, performance. This is Carmen Lee's company. One thing that I think was really interesting in an article she published last week had to do with how two pieces of compute that look identical on paper have wildly different performances, everything from reliability to cost to speed. And I think as you distribute inference. Do you mash together very different types of compute and try to optimize for reliability? I think is super interesting. And that gets to kind of one thing I find really interesting that NVIDIA is doing is this concept of AI factories.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To really drive and increase profit margins, but also it's the ability to kind of have control of your own destiny. And I think a lot of folks are starting to, the application layer companies and inference clouds are grappling with how can we build and own and operate our own infrastructure. And that's something I'm really looking into.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the key question that we're really focused on is how can we finance the next build, which is distributed inference? And maybe the last one or two takeaways would be one thing I'm seeing is for every application layer company out there, the highest line item from COGS is compute. And then the inference companies and inference clouds out there, most of them are purchasing up compute from either other clouds or unused capacity. And when you look at like margins for that, you've got like layered margins. And so there's a push to kind of own your own infrastructure.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're starting to see distributed inference, which could be four or five megawatts and five separate data centers and stitching them together in different areas, right? And that looks very different from a kind of power perspective, how you, you know, the software matters a lot more when you're doing like distributed inference. And then in terms of your question, how it impacts us, I think one of the things that we've been focused on is where we started this conversation with you on financing compute, that was really obviously started with mostly training. A lot of those hyperscalers are now doing a lot of inference on that same infrastructure, but these are investment grade counterparties. It's easier to lend money to build out these clusters to those customers. I think now that you have this new crop of inference clouds and application layer companies that are needing tons of inference.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think one thing that's interesting when you look at companies like that and other inference clouds is how do you optimize the compute and build out these clusters that could actually look very different than a training cluster where a training cluster might be 50, 100, 150 megawatts in one kind of four walls.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a lot more variability. And so there's a lot more nuances in optimizing inference. I think the second thing that's observed that I've seen is inference is definitely a memory problem, a memory throughput problem. On the inference side, you have these kind of phases called prefill and decode, right? And how you optimize that across a fleet of GPUs is actually a unique technical problem. And then the third is what I would say is distribution. A lot of times training infrastructure is quite centralized. What you're seeing with inference is in many use cases as this becomes more ubiquitous, you're going to have more and more decentralized inference clusters. And actually one of my favorite companies is one of your companies, Base 10, which is really optimizing distributed inference at scale.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the time in a way Yeah, so I think one thing that's interesting that we're seeing is obviously there's been the shift from training to inference over the last few years. That split continues to grow on the inference side as usable and ROI positive applications get developed. I think the two things I see on the inference side now is inference is a lot more complex than I think initially thought. And what I mean by that is it's not as simple as you train a model and then it's easy to inference it. In certain cases you can do that on similar infrastructure, but there are issues around latency, fungibility of that and really optimizing the cost of your compute on the inference side. How do you manage peaks of inference demand? And obviously it's not linear like training your GPUs are on all the time 100% of the time. And so with inference.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the circularity comment, I think, applies when you're building speculative compute and capacity or if you're purely doing vendor financing and it's you're trying to do some type of reverec type item related to that. And that's not what we see. What we see is financing to support, to build out the demand against use cases that are very positive in their ROI. Our perspective is that that's not a real concern that we have. And it really has to do with who are the ultimate buyers here. Ultimate buyers have been and at scale the hyperscalers. They're deploying this at scale and the economics are positive when you look at a unit economic basis in terms of deploying intelligence. And I think we're at a moment in time where we're really starting to see that.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know it's obviously a topic du jour. And I think the way we see it and frame it really has to do with the demand signals and who are the eventual buyers and how is this being used. And so, at least from what our perspective, we continue to see insatiable demand. And if you go back to the previous kind of big tech buildout back in the early 2000s, there was obviously a lot of fiber that was being built and you had dark fiber and overbuild happening. And I think what you see here is I've, you know, you don't see any dark GPUs. Exactly. Any GPUs used. And then number two, you're starting to see actual economic value. So I think last year Enterprise AI had about $37 billion of total TAM and it's continued to grow like crazy. And at least personally, and I'm sure you see this too, but I use these tools all the time. It's incredibly valuable, right? The actual tokenomics of positive ROI is actually here now, I think, from our perspective.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's actually great at math. And so for the hoppers, the H100 or H200 series of GPUs into the Blackwells, there was a claim made that it could be 30 times more efficient. And I think the data from some analysis showed that it was 90 to 100 times more efficient in terms of inference performance. And so I think part of the need to go to these new chips is not, it's, yes, more computing power, but it's actually, it can be cheaper to operate. Price performance. Price performance, exactly.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I think you see not only, you're starting to see interesting and not only just the high end players want access to the latest chips, you're seeing the latest, you know, obviously startups want access to those. And I think it has to do with efficiency One of our friends or one of your friends as well, Dylan Patel, over at Semi Analysis, posted this interesting article last week on inference and inference spend and inference kind of performance. And there's a lot of jokes made about Jensen math. And it was interesting because the”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We bought chips, right? Yeah. And there was this thought that, okay, there's going to be an overbuild of chips and then the supply constraints will go away. Well, fast forward to 2026. And what we see is there is obviously more availability of chips, but to build and operate these data centers requires people, power, infrastructure, a lot of these things that have a lot of bottlenecks. And so actually taking these chips and then making them into useful revenue generating assets is really the bottleneck now.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting is if you look at like 2023, 2024, we were very supply constrained and the supply constraint was chips. And no one could get access to chips”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the space was so nascent, the operators had no experience. And I think now what you're starting to see is a blend of investment grade and non-investment grade. So like, what does that actually mean? What that means is you're seeing these structures with investment grade counterparties like your hyperscalers and your other corporates that are IG mixed alongside some of the AI native companies. And so think of the AI model companies, the labs, software companies that are building AI, startups. You're seeing those companies get mixed in alongside the IG companies to build a portfolio because now you have the history that you can do this. And now you have structures where you can kind of balance the risk with IG and non-IG. And we're continuing to see that kind of move to be able to help finance really the model companies and a lot of these startups. Obviously, that was difficult to do three or four years ago that's starting to become easier as these companies have more.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changed in several ways where the first is when you look at these SPVs, I think you're starting to see ways to change the portfolio construction of who can go inside of one of these debt structures. And so early on in the early days, these were all only investment grade counterparties”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First is on that depreciation question in these kind of debt structures, it doesn't really matter because the debts fully paid off by the end of the debt term against committed contractual contracts from investment-grade counterparties. And then at the very end, the actual upside or residual value, and I know there's a lot of questions on residual value, is held by the cloud player in this example, right, CoreWeed, right? Or any others. And that's a really interesting prospect because you can see a world where All of this capex is paid off incredibly quickly, and there's an opportunity to redeploy it where you can redeploy it without having to pay for any additional debt, obviously, against that redeployment.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's unique to talk about. And then the second one really has to do with the debt itself and how it amortizes. And so in simple terms, when you have debt, you have principal and interest and you have to pay it off over time. And in these structures, typically the payback period on the CapEx was roughly two to three years. And the structures themselves, the debt was over five years, you know, four to five years in length, where the entire debt amortized during the outstanding period that the debt was out. And so at the end, you ended up with zero balance for the debt and there was no balloon payment or anything that was really due on the back end. And so the question that often comes up is, isn't that a very risky type of structure because these things are depreciating incredibly quickly? So I think there's two comments.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying, I'm committed to pay you. I know you can pay me. Take your pay contracts, and they're like five years in length. So I think that was like one feature.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's billions of debt on these highly depreciating assets, and it's extremely speculative. And what was oftentimes characterized in the media was these debt structures had GPUs as collateral, and that's like putting a used car as collateral, which is obviously just going to depreciate incredibly fast. That's a very risky kind of structure. And I think what got missed was the GPUs themselves were actually like the second, second, or tertiary level of collateral in those instruments. The primary collateral was the contracted cash flows from investment-grade counterparties.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The consumer of the computer, exactly. You know, you're Microsoft's, your meta's, et cetera, of the world. And I think the reason that was done is really twofold. When you look at the scale of the problem, those particular contracts needed billions of dollars of debt to finance the CapEx. Obviously for a nascent and new and growing company, that's really hard to raise. So part of structuring it this way is ensuring that you have kind of guaranteed offtake on the back end to minimize the risk for debt holders. And I think that's a lot of what the market got wrong, especially when there was a lot of press about this early on, where it was.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, exactly. And so that's where I think when you and I have talked about structuring, and I can give a couple examples if that's helpful. I think the first one was DDTL structures or SPV debt structures that Think of it as like an SPV. Inside of the SPV are the CapEx, the collateral, which is the GPUs, and the contracts themselves. And so in this example, the actual asset or collateral was not really just the GPUs themselves. It was really the contracted cash flows. From in this case, investment grade counterparties. And so I think the reason is the concept.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just using equity dollars alone is not an efficient way to scale this. That's obviously massive dilution. It's not an easy problem to solve. When we first met.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if you look at kind of CapEx, right? Let's starting with that. So CapEx for AI compute and infrastructure in 2026, at least from the hyperscalers, is projected to be between 660 and 690 billion dollars. And over the next several years, that scales to trillions of dollars, right? And so the scale of the problem is how do you build that size of CapEx efficiently? And I think a lot of that has to do with not only your ability to have access to those core elements, energy, power, and your ability to have data center space, et cetera. But I think one of the things that's not talked about as much is capital. And access to capital, and how is capital structured? And what I mean by that is this is billions to trillions of dollars of CapEx.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Access to energy power data center and then reliability really had to do with their ability to manage a giant fleet of GPUs, which is actually quite complicated, whether it's reliability from GPU failures or software challenges, building a fleet that can healthily be online all the time at 99.9% reliability is incredibly difficult. And that's something that they had started back in 2017, 2018 timeframe, and they were at the right moment at the right place with the right technology stack to really build the optimal cloud for that moment.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at that moment, it allowed them to build very large scale reliable clusters for OpenAI and obviously many other customers since then. And I think the last comment I'll make is what really allowed them to kind of win this market early on was focus on two things. It was scale. Reliability. And I think those were the two things that are really difficult for a lot of the new entrants since then because scale has to do with your access to capital.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's when things really started growing because the sheer amount of compute that was needed to train an LLM, this was like the first time it had ever been done. And what was interesting was what kind of allowed them to take advantage of that opportunity was the historical kind of backgrounds of a lot of the founders were in energy asset management. And when you fast forward to today and you look and like what constitutes your ability to build a GPU cloud, it's your ability to manage these highly complex assets and it fundamentally comes down to access to power and energy. And so they had these elements with them. They obviously brought on a lot of talent on the cloud side and to put all these together.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I think what was interesting is we made our first investment in 2021, and then about a year later, we continue to see expansion of use cases. At that time, it was called high-performance compute. And then it was kind of towards the end of 22, the whole AI discussion started. And as we entered 2023, Coreweave started to train models for OpenAI.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, I think, you know, interestingly at Magnetar, we have invested across asset classes. So we've done a lot of property investing, real estate investing as an example Investing in energy. We had an energy business historically. And so a lot of the elements for what constitutes a data center of power, energy, land, real estate. We had a lot of the background in those spaces. I think we were new to compute, right? Like that was a new sector for us. And so kind of those two worlds merging, we obviously came up on the curve on the compute side, but we had a lot of background on the elements that constitute what it means to build a cloud.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we made our first investment before the AI trade started, but we added a lot of optionality where we could envision a world where the GPU could be used for a lot of different high performance kind of computing applications. I think AI was on the radar, machine learning was on the radar for us. But I wouldn't say that we could foresee everything that happened. We just happened to be at the right place at the right time. And we continue to double down. As the company progressed and started shifting into more workloads that were machine learning and kind of AI training based.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we actually stumbled across the compute problem before it was compute. 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 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 like 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 is all before AI.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So Magnetar's been around for actually, this is our 20th year. We're an alternative asset manager, and that can mean a lot of different things. 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 when people look at us and 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 going to talk a lot about that. But to build out and optimize the balance sheets for these capital intensive businesses.”
2026-02-26 · No Priors · How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT