By the end of 2026, AI capital expenditure is projected to hit nearly $700 billion. The question isn’t who has the best model, but who has the most creative financing to build out AI infrastructure and beyond. Sarah Guo is joined by Neil Tiwari, Managing Director at Magnetar Capital, a financial innovator helping the AI industry scale from billions to trillions of dollars in CapEx. Neil explains some of the debt structures used to finance massive GPU clusters, who is taking the risk, and how the industry is maturing. Sarah and Neil also discuss how power distribution, energy storage, and physical materials like steel are the bottlenecks of the AI industry. Plus, Neil gives his take on the future of inference-optimized clouds, and why the market shift away from software and into infrastructure might be an overreaction. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Chapters: 00:00 – Cold Open 00:05 – Neil Tiwari Introduction 00:26 – Magnetar’s Story 01:28 – Why CoreWeave Helped Magnetar Win 06:15 – Scaling CapEx Efficiently 09:02 – Debunking GPU Collateral Risk 11:42 – How Deal Structures Evolve 13:01 – What Bottlenecks Buildout 15:28 – Circular Financing Critiques 17:35 – The Shift from Training to Inference Workloads 23:10 – AI Factories 24:12 – Constraints of the Current Power Grid 28:27 – Sovereign Compute Buildouts 29:54 – Physical AI Capital Needs 32:48 – The Capital Rotation Away from SaaS 36:04 – Conclusion

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

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

## Participants

- **Sarah Guo** (Conviction)
- **Neil Tiwari** (Magnetar Capital)

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_00] Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Neil Tiwari of Magnetar Capital. This is a $22 billion alternative asset manager at the center of the AI Compute buildup. We talk about the financial innovation, depreciation of GPUs, and what's next in AI Compute. Welcome. Thanks so much for doing this, Neil. Neil Tiwari Absolutely. You know, really happy to be here.

[SPEAKER_00] 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?

[SPEAKER_03] Sure. So Magnetar has 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.

[SPEAKER_03] And the third is more of a systematic or quantitative-focused public strategy as well. And so I think, you know, 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.

[SPEAKER_03] 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.

[SPEAKER_00] So I remember hearing about you guys originally. You're the first investor I think we've ever had on the podcast. I'm excited about this. That's exciting. Thank you. I remember hearing about you and Magnetar initially around, I was like, who's this big owner of CoreWeave? 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 solve it?

[SPEAKER_03] Yeah, so we actually, you know, stumbled across 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 an instrument to mine cryptocurrencies. And interestingly, that same instrument could be used for high-performance computing applications.

[SPEAKER_03] 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 was all before AI. And so we made our first investment before the AI trade started.

[SPEAKER_03] But we added a lot of optionality where, you know, we could envision a world where the GPU co...

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

Transcript

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

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.