“When you introduce new models, introduce a new way of doing business, disrupt what has been a static environment, it’s going to take some people some time,” Intrator said Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco. But, he added, more people are beginning to understand the CoreWeave’s business model.

“We came out into one of the most challenging environments,” Intrator said of CoreWeave’s March IPO, which occurred very close to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. “In spite of the incredible headwinds, we’re able to launch a successful IPO.”

CoreWeave, which priced its IPO at $40 per share, has experienced frequent severe up-and-down price swings in the eight months since its public market debut. At its closing price of $90.66 on Tuesday, the stock remains well above its IPO price.

As Fortune reported last month, CoreWeave’s rapid rise has been fueled by an aggressive, debt-heavy strategy to stand up data centers at unprecedented speed for AI customers. And for now, the bet is still paying off. In its third-quarter results released in November, the company said its revenue backlog nearly doubled in a single quarter—to $55.6 billion from $30 billion—reflecting long-term commitments from marquee clients including Meta, OpenAI, and French AI startup Poolside. Both earnings and revenue came in ahead of Wall Street expectations.

But the numbers were not all celebratory. CoreWeave disclosed a further increase in the debt it has taken on to finance its expansion, and it revised its full-year revenue outlook downward—suggesting that, even with historic demand in the pipeline.

With media headlines calling CoreWeave a “ticking time bomb,” with critics calling out insider stock sales, circular financing accusations and an overreliance on Nvidia, Intrator was asked whether he felt CoreWeave was misunderstood.

“Look, we built a company that is challenging one of the most stable businesses that exist—that cloud business, these three massive players,” he said, referring to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  I feel like it’s incumbent on CoreWeave to introduce a new business model on how the cloud is going to be built and run. And that’s what we’re doing.” 

He repeatedly framed CoreWeave not as a GPU reseller or traditional data-center operator but as a company purpose-built from scratch to deliver high-performance, parallelized computing for AI workloads. That focus, he said, means designing proprietary software that orchestrates GPUs, building and colocating its own infrastructure, and moving “up the stack” through acquisitions such as Weights & Biases and OpenPipe.

Intrator also defended the company’s debt strategy, saying CoreWeave is effectively inventing a new financing model for AI infrastructure. He pointed to the company’s ability to repurpose power sources, rapidly deploy capacity, and finance large-scale clusters as proof it is solving problems incumbents never had to face.

“When I look back at history of the company, it took us a year with with a company investor like Fidelity, before they were like, ‘Oh, I get it,’” he said. “So look, we’ve been public for eight months. I couldn’t be prouder of what the company has accomplished.” 

Earlier this week, the U.K. government announced a $965 million investment to create more apprenticeships and place 50,000 young people into roles.

In partnership with regional leaders, the three-year initiative will equip young hopefuls with the skills training needed for local job opportunities. A $186 million chunk of the eye-watering funding will be used for a pilot in which mayors will connect the Gen Zers, especially NEETs, with nearby employers. And to ease the financial burden on some companies, the plan will also cover the full cost of apprenticeships for talent under 25 years old at small and medium-size businesses.

U.K. Gen Zers will have access to more apprenticeship roles in high-demand industries like hospitality and retail. But the government is still paying close attention to the critical skills young professionals need in the age of AI; new short courses in engineering, digital skills, and AI will also start rolling out starting April 2026. This apprenticeship push by the U.K. is all part of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s master plan to get two-thirds of young people active in higher-level learning and apprenticeships, after a sharp drop in 2017.

“For too long, success has been measured by how many young people go to university. That narrow view has held back opportunity and created barriers we need to break,” Starmer said. “It’s time to change the way apprenticeships are viewed and to put them on an equal footing with university.”

Gen Zers are struggling with unemployment in the U.K. and abroad

The U.K.’s ambitious billion-dollar strategy is a welcome one, as youth unemployment rates have surged all around the world.

During the first half of last year, more than 16%, or almost 460,000 of 18- to 24-year-old U.K. men, were NEETs—the highest rate in over a decade. On a global scale, about a fifth of people between ages 15 and 24 in 2023 were NEET-status. And for those actively on the job-hunt, options are scarce. In 2023 and 2024, more than 1.2 million applications were submitted for just under 17,000 open graduate roles in the U.K., according to the Institute of Student Employers (ISE). 

It marked the highest number of applications per job ever recorded since the ISE started collecting data in 1991.

But across the pond, the situation doesn’t look any better: In 2022, there were roughly 4.3 million jobless Gen Z NEETs in the United States. And as of September this year, 9.4% of men and 9% of women ages 20 to 24 were jobless—more than two times higher than the general 4.4% unemployment rate, according to a FRED analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

What’s more, U.S. officials caution the problem could get even worse. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) warned that joblessness among recent college graduates could skyrocket to as high as 25% in the next two to three years, thanks to AI. 

Similar to the U.K. government, Warner proposed a job retraining program—and the issue goes beyond party lines. In partnership with Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), they introduced a bill that would require businesses and federal agencies to report any AI-related job disruption to the Department of Labor, with results to be published to the public.