The bonus pick that is not nuclear
Buried at the end of Karim Rahemtulla’s Energy Cube presentation is a second report called “OpenAI’s $22 Billion Secret Partner.” The name it points to is CoreWeave (CRWV), an AI data-center operator, and the first thing to understand is that this pick has nothing to do with nuclear power. It is a different thesis, bolted onto a nuclear sleeve as a bonus.
What CoreWeave does
CoreWeave builds and operates data centers purpose-built for the enormous graphics-processing workloads that train and run AI models. It is not a utility and not an energy company. The reason it sits inside an “Energy Cube” pitch is that AI data centers are the reason the electricity demand story exists at all: the nuclear reactors and uranium miners in the main sleeve are downstream of the same AI buildout that CoreWeave serves directly.
The OpenAI and NVIDIA ties
The pitch leans on two relationships. CoreWeave has a reported $22 billion relationship with OpenAI, and NVIDIA invested about $2 billion in the company. Both are real and both matter, because they signal that the biggest buyers and the biggest supplier of AI compute take CoreWeave seriously as infrastructure. When the maker of the chips and one of the largest model labs are both financially tied to an operator, that operator has passed a meaningful bar.
The circular-financing debate
This is where the stock gets contentious. CoreWeave was one of the most-watched AI-infrastructure public listings of the past year, and it is a poster child for a debate about how AI data-center financing works. The concern is that some of the demand CoreWeave reports is funded in part by capital that flows back to the chipmakers and the model labs, creating financing loops that are hard for outsiders to trace. Skeptics argue the economics depend on continued access to cheap capital; bulls argue that the compute shortage is real enough to keep utilization high regardless.
The presentation does not mention any of this, and frames the company as a name “most investors have never heard,” which is hard to square with one of the most-covered AI public listings of the cycle.
Why the nuclear sleeve includes it
CoreWeave earns its slot in the pitch through the electricity story. A data-center operator is a direct consumer of power, and the Energy Cube argument is that AI’s appetite for electricity is what makes nuclear, and the uranium supply chain that feeds it, valuable. So CoreWeave is the demand side of the same trade, even though it has no reactor, no uranium, and no radiation-monitoring business.
The price since the tease
CoreWeave traded around $99.54 when the tease price was set and closed near $87.59 on September 25, down about 12%. That makes it one of the four Energy Cube names underwater since the tease, and a reminder that a high-profile partner list does not insulate a stock from a drawdown.
How the financing debate plays out for shareholders
The circular-financing question is not academic, because it determines what kind of shareholder you actually are. If CoreWeave’s customers are funded in part by capital that originates with the chipmakers or the model labs, then part of the revenue is, in effect, a loan flowing through the income statement. In a rising market that looks like growth; in a tightening one it can look like a liability, because the same relationships that fund the demand can also slow the checks when capital gets scarce.
None of this means the company is unsound. It means the investment case rests on two questions an ordinary reactor pitch never asks: whether the compute shortage stays deep enough to keep utilization high, and whether CoreWeave can keep financing its expansion on terms that do not erode equity. A uranium miner’s case rests on the uranium price; CoreWeave’s rests on the capital cycle. That is the difference between a commodity bet and an infrastructure-financing bet, and it is why this bonus pick deserves its own analysis rather than a ride on the nuclear sleeve. The OpenAI and NVIDIA ties cut both ways here: they validate the platform, but they also mean the company’s most important counterparties are simultaneously its customers, its suppliers, and, through the financing debate, potential sources of the very demand that shows up in its revenue. Investors who can trace that web are positioned to hold the name through volatility; investors who cannot should treat it as a high-beta call on AI infrastructure rather than a quiet, utility-like compounder.
How to think about CoreWeave
CoreWeave is a real company with real revenue and real strategic partners, but it is an AI-infrastructure bet, not a nuclear one. If you are evaluating it, do so on data-center economics, power procurement, and financing structure, not on the small modular reactor story. The data-center power demand theme is covered in our data-center power demand piece, and the nuclear sleeve’s actual reactor plays are in our Amentum stock explainer and nuclear energy ETF walkthrough.
The honest read: CoreWeave is a legitimate, high-volatility AI play that gets marketed as a “secret” even though it is anything but. Separate it from the nuclear thesis and it stands or falls on its own.
Ready to see the research? Click here to access Karim Rahemtulla’s report.
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