CoreWeave - thoughts from CRWV's Fully Connected conference...a maybe-better strategy, but a long way to go

CoreWeave hosted its first Fully Connected conference in San Francisco this week, aimed at AI engineers, platform engineers and CTOs — a clear marketing play to build a network and ecosystem around its platform, akin to AWS re:Invent, Google Cloud Next or Nvidia GTC. It coincides with CRWV's "we're no longer a neocloud" messaging and the launch of new developer tools called CoreWeave Forge, which combines Weights & Biases, OpenPipe post-training, Marimo notebooks and CRWV services into an "AI Loop." Bernstein remains skeptical of CoreWeave's GPU rental business model, believing hyperscalers win the market, and sees Forge's differentiation and longevity as questionable given most capabilities are available from other providers or open source. Rating (Underperform) and $74 price target unchanged.