CoreWeave Fully Connected 2026 | Jean English, CoreWeave

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More from CoreWeave Fully Connected 2026

Jean English

CMO

CoreWeave

play_circle_outline Fully Connected Recap: AI Cloud Era, Accelerating Discovery, CoreWeave and the AI Factory for Production Intelligence

play_circle_outline Forge product unifying acquisitions (Weights & Biases, Marimo, OpenPipe, Monolith, Conductor)

play_circle_outline Theme: AI loop/infinity loop and fully connected intelligence

play_circle_outline Survey results: customers value AI-first infrastructure and fast GPU access

play_circle_outline CoreWeave strengths: pace, performance, and customer partnership

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Transcript

Jean English, CoreWeave

Jean English

CMO CoreWeave

In this interview from Fully Connected 2026, Jean English, chief marketing officer of CoreWeave, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and Dave Vellante to discuss the strategy behind CoreWeave's inaugural flagship conference and its positioning as a full-stack AI cloud. English frames the event around an AI loop that connects discovery, acceleration and compounding innovation across labs, platforms and enterprises. She points to Caterpillar's use of AI to improve job-site safety and Aston Martin's Formula One race-data lab as examples of how CoreWeave's recent acquis... Read more

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How might this week's conference be summarized for someone who didn't attend in person, including the key themes and developments around AI? add

How advanced is Forge's AI capability, and how have your recent acquisitions been integrated to help enterprise customers connect their data and improve inference? add

Why was "Connected" chosen as the theme, and why should the AI loop be open and connected to different models, frameworks, and clouds? add

What did your survey of CoreWeave customers find about their reasons for choosing and staying with CoreWeave versus hyperscalers or on‑prem deployments, and how was the survey conducted? add

What do you think about CoreWeave? add

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(INTRO)

John Furrier

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's livestream here in San Francisco for CoreWeave's Fully Connected conference. It's the first inaugural conference for CoreWeave and the first industry conference in the new category that we've been documenting. I wrote a post on SiliconANGLE, a new infrastructure layer is emerging. This is the former NeoCloud, but now it's growing super fast. Jean English is joining us and helping us wrap up the conference. Of course, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Jean, great to see

>> you.Oh, thanks for having

John Furrier

>> me.

>> Congratulations.Thank

Dave Vellante

>> you.Thanks,

John Furrier

>> John.Thanks,

>> Dave.Thank you for having us.

John Furrier

>> Not too shabby for an inaugural conference.

>> Well, we know how to do it right at CoreWeave.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, good.

>> Fast.

John Furrier

>> Things came together. Great participation on the ecosystem. All the key partners. NVIDIA's right here. All the top players. Great news flow. And I love Forge. you got things kind of nicely packaged. So compliments to you and the team.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, it's our pleasure to be here in the early days. Right. We saw so many. We saw Kubernetes, we saw the Hadoop era, we saw that the cloud era originally. And so now we feel like the AI era is finally here with theCUBE. So thank you.

>> We're in the AI cloud era.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So looking back this week as we zoom out, this is almost like the post-game show, but we got a little more time left in the day, the final day here. Looking back, how would you describe what's happened here for someone who hasn't come in person, maybe watches theCUBE, sees some social media, some news coverage, which has been extensive, what would you say to them about what's happened?

>> I think the conversation this week is all about how AI is really accelerating human discovery and all the dots that are connected have never been connected before. They've existed over time. They may have been left in different places and different timeframes, different people in different areas around the world. But the ability to connect them all, that's what AI is doing. And then from there, how do you accelerate delivery and creation of all these new opportunities? And that's truly what this conference has been about— acceleration, AI loops, and then how to continue to learn and expand on the compounding impact.

John Furrier

>> I like how you guys brought in some learnings from, I would just say, some of the best practices and techniques. Loop, looping, which you've mentioned as part of the theme, the infinity loop. Clever, but it ties into one of the best practices we're seeing or one of the ways AI is working. Also the rise of the AI factory that, we've been covering for now 2 years and brought that concept to Wall Street and people are now figuring it out. But you have this AI factory concept of an entire system producing intelligence that's creating the looping. You got announcements like RL rollouts. Yeah. And walk us through that. Ian Buck came on, talked about the importance of Vera Rubin. Yes, the entire system. This is a new thing. So as you look at that, you got to try to package it up in a way that's compelling, but also people can understand. And your customers are doing the talking. We've had great customers on. So that's been the big story from our standpoint.

>> Yeah, we have customers across labs, platforms, and enterprises who are all here with us. The story has been around the loop. When we look at where we were 18 months ago, we were a new IPO company. Immediately we were recognized by SemiAnalysis as the only platinum-rated AI cloud. We've actually been that 3 times.

Dave Vellante

>> Repeat.

>> We are a repeat. And that's really exciting to see because that's where consistency matters.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, I like your accelerating human discovery because, technology gets sometimes such a bad rap, but we had MasterClass on talking about how they are just sort of supercharging learning, which is amazing. Applications on top. So a new layer of applications that's emerging that you guys are powering. So I like that you start there. Think about before Google, we had to go to the library and do all the searching. Technology's always sort of advanced human discovery, and now it's just at another level.

>> It's at another level. So superintelligence level for sure. And what we talked about this week with Forge was so much around how we had these capabilities in the past. We've been acquiring companies the last 18 months. We had Weights & Biases. We acquired Marimo. We acquired OpenPipe. We acquired Monolith. We've had Conductor. All these have been tools that have been in the toolkit, but us bringing them together into one continuous loop has really helped us to identify how we help our customers advance what they're doing with inference. And Caterpillar is a great example of that. MasterClass is another great example of that. But there's many enterprises today that have had a lot of data. They just haven't connected it all together.

John Furrier

>> Share some stories from some customers and/or partners that really encapsulate that piece of it, the discovery, the innovation. The piece parts coming together as a system optimized for success. What stories jump out at you? Can you share stories from this week or even hallway conversations? Share some, give a peek behind the curtain as

>> we—Sure. I think one of my favorite ones from this week has been Caterpillar. most people know what Caterpillar is. They've seen the machinery. They've either seen it somewhere in an industrial site, they've seen it at a manufacturing site, they've seen it at a home. Wherever it might be, has been a household brand now for many, many, many years. But as you think about what they're doing to improve job safety, where not to put humans where it might not be safe, where do you use AI and start to understand even what's happening on a job site, what's happening on the side of a road, what might not be safe for a human to be. And that to me is such a personal level of what AI can do. Yes, it can drive more intelligence, but it can actually just improve human life.

John Furrier

>> I have to ask you about the Fully Connected tagline. I love your social media hit. You're going around, Fully Connected, Fully Connected. I'm like, she's locking in. Clever video is well produced, was clever. Thank you. Okay, so props to that. Why that? What's the meaning behind it? Obviously, we kind of added to it, Fully Connected Intelligence, Fully Connected Robotics. But what's that mean? Take us through the thought process. Of how that became the core theme.

>> Sure. It comes back to this loop and the AI loop and whether you run, you're observing, you're curating, evaluating, improving all along the way. It really is about not just being closed. We believe that the loop should be connected. It should be open to different models, different frameworks, different clouds, but that every single version should be better than the last. And that means that it can't be closed. It has to be open, even open weights, open models. But that's what connected came from. And so here at CoreWeave, we believe that, yes, it should be fully connected. It actually wasn't on purpose, but it actually did come together quite

Dave Vellante

>> well.Really? That's

>> the—conference a while ago. But as we started to build out theCUBE, it became obvious that the theme was quite well represented.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.And one theme that I would like to share with you and I want to get your thoughts on, because I think this is going to be durable. First of all, CoreWeave brand is well known. You obviously went public. Business is going great. But you get the best supply from NVIDIA. A lot of customers say, hey, they got the product and they were getting noticeable performance out of the gate on everything that they did—tokens, optimization. So your team, highly technical, came together. That ecosystem formula, we've kind of teased it out on our last video, but also we've been talking about it. It's not like yesteryear's ecosystem equation. This is a co-designed building off NVIDIA's, but this is now becoming a standard kind of AI cloud practice, co-design, infinite loops of feedback, always on and very open. This is the formula. How do you look at that? And then do you intentionally integrate that into your thoughts on how to organize your team, how to help the product teams communicate the commercial value? Identify new paths for customers. Forge is great. Now we could use it technically. Anyone can sign up. So kind of a whole new path.

>> Yeah, the partner ecosystems, we just announced that this week as well. Obviously, we're very thankful for NVIDIA and the partnership we've had with NVIDIA. So much of that is based on the infrastructure that we've been building out together. And we were the first to bring up and validate Vera Rubin. We're very proud of that. Our teams do work at a breakneck speed in order to make sure that we're getting all of those GPUs up and running quickly. But it's so much beyond the GPU. It's about a full stack AI cloud. And that means that the tooling that we need, there's got to be other partners that we work with. Yeah, that could be at the tooling level, that could be at the infrastructure level, that could be how we have APIs and connections with lots and lots of different models. It can be what we need to actually have partners inside of our infrastructure layer based on customer choice.

Dave Vellante

>> You know, that story you told about Jean English, as somebody who has to think about events like this, you have to plan it well in advance, but things are changing so fast. So how has that affected the way in which you plan for something like this with customers and themes and partners? Has the cycle had to compress or do you have to just be agile and keep iterating as things change in the market? How do you approach that?

>> Well, we work at a fast pace here. Yeah, right. And I would say a few years ago, you maybe start planning this event a year ahead, right? It would be impossible to plan this event a year ahead. The way in which this industry moves, the models that are coming out, at a moment's notice, the new ways in which technology is really compounding on the last, there is no way to plana year in advance. So we really plan this months in advance we start to make sure that we lock in, yes, what is the theme? But we start to look at really most importantly, who are the customers who have the best stories? Who are the customers who are learning with us? And they're not— we said, don't just come tell all the great stories, actually just come say, how's it working? What are you learning? How— what would you share with other people so that they can accelerate their learning as well? So we started with the customer.

Dave Vellante

>> And so you lock in the

>> venue.Okay. And then we go look at

Dave Vellante

>> customers.You say, okay, who wants to be there, partners and so forth. And then you sprint in the last, whatever, several weeks.

>> We really focus on what customers, what are their stories. And then we really— it's so much of an AI cloud is how do you get your hands on the product? So we're all focused on how do you make sure that we're actually getting labs where people can come and learn. One of my favorite labs is the Aston Martin lab where we actually took real data and brought it into the team and they actually started. Yeah. So we had 100 people working on Aston Martin Formula One data to look at race signals and how they could actually build more models to an agent to improve how the car—

Dave Vellante

>> And we learned today that's open chatter that humans used to have to try to curate in real time.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And you can hear the other guys talking to you. You infer when they're tired. Yeah. Franz comes in. I like what you said about the approach of just letting people tell their stories because in classic marketing, there'd be a lot of pomp and circumstance. You obviously gotta protect the brand. CoreWeave's kind of a first mover. That's a great brand. You're number one right now. So that's easy. Just keep the branding out there. But this idea of people just telling how it works, 'cause we're in a formation stage of a category. You don't need the glitzy stuff. You can just do hear, share and learn. How does that change your market? Does that make you more of a content producer? Do you organize more labs? More hackathons are turning into company building moments. I've been hearing that all past 6 months. It's not hackathons, it's build a company-a-thon. You can move so fast.

>> That's where we are, for sure. Yeah, you can move so fast.

John Furrier

>> So as you look at your marketing opportunity with your teams, obviously product marketing, you get a lot of great products coming out. But yeah, you have these discovery loops in your own customer base. Partner base.

>> Well, we're looking for customers who are putting production to the test, and a lot of customers right now are looking at inference. yes, the model makers are definitely training big frontier models. the enterprises are working on the best use case to show results and impact. And it's not just, , AI is driving a transformation. It is what is the use case that's relevant for my team. I was talking with the company this week, they had 100 use cases. They started with one with us. Now they're like, if I can scale the one, I can connect to another. And I can get across all 100 and have a big impact.

John Furrier

>> So now I want to share with you some research that we did that was not prompted by CoreWeave. We did a survey with your customers. Oh, nice. We did a survey, around AI, around tools, and around data. Dave, share with her the survey that you did with their customers because it was a— we can narrow the sample size down because we know who we're— who the target. We don't need an N of 500, but the results were pretty instructive.

Dave Vellante

>> It was 15 CoreWeave customers and we got the results last Thursday. We wrote them up, , I recorded them Friday and published this past weekend. We had 15 CoreWeave customers. 7 were longtime customers, longtime, , a couple years, really deep into it. 6 were relatively new, but, , knew the platform. 2 decided not to go with CoreWeave. The methodology was we took statements from Michael Intrator and Nitin Agrawal, at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference. Last couple of earnings calls and said, okay, this is what the vendor says. Let's see what the customers say. It was quite remarkable. For instance, Michael Intrator said, look, yeah, GPUs might get them in the door, but it's the quality of the experience that keeps them there. All 7 of those customers that have been with you for a long time, confirmed that with really amazing quotes and a number of other factors. So we wanted to understand how CoreWeave compares to the hyperscalers and NeoClouds and on-prem. And we learned a lot. It was quite, again, another great quote. Well, we got to CoreWeave because they could get us the access in weeks, whereas AWS was going to take months to get bare metal access. And a number of those types of factors. So that was huge. And so John said, well, it's easy when you're number one. It's not. You're on top. You got to stay there now, right? So very positive feedback.

>> Well, I definitely need to start working with you on doing more customer surveys because this sounds incredible. I'll share it with you.

John Furrier

>> If you have a targeted, but this is the thing, it's so early, they're eager to share and give feedback. But this is the learning thing I was getting to. We're in a market where we're seeing uncertainty on Wall Street, we've been evangelizing and introducing AI Factory to folks. You were our first interview, remember, at theCUBE at the NYSE. A lot's happened. We learned a lot and the stacks are coming together. You guys are exploding. And so people are realizing the value of retrieval. For example, VAST, the storage is in the inference flow now. Why? Because the engineers put it into the system. So this innovation is just going to keep coming. We think it's very, very early.

>> We think it's very early as well. we talk to clients every day and when we hear from them, they definitely see us for 3 things. They see us as having unmatched pace. we're at the maximum pace you've ever seen. Anything we're doing, we're going at the speed of light. And that's because our customers are going fast and we need to meet them where they are. Our performance is top, top notch. And that can be performance on GPUs, getting more visibility into the platform. You think about throughput, goodput, all the things that customers are looking for when they have to think about, I don't want to have latency. And then when you get to the partnership, that's the one that most customers care about. So when you hear about, yes, they came for the GPU, they came for the capacity, they then see the value of the AI cloud. And a lot of the cloud is not just technology, but it's the teams and those teams with experts. And they're either experts they can reach hands-on, they can reach experts via ARIA, which is, our agent. But they love the direct connection with our—

John Furrier

>> I was talking to some companies last night at dinner and they said, what do you think about CoreWeave? I'm like, look, I love CoreWeave. We did a launch with them in Palo Alto. They love theCUBE. Of course we love them. But here's why they're relevant, because they've created a market because their pace is so fast. They're technically on top of things. We've followed Chen and the team there. We've been following what you guys are doing on the product side, the customer and just with NVIDIA. it's almost like the alpha wave of engineers and people. The pace is not just you. You have a shared— people have shared mission. They want to go fast too. But their alternative is to build and slow down because they just can't keep pace. So you guys are the pace setters and there's a big market. So it's not just so much that I like CoreWeave, certainly on all the things I mentioned, but the market is moving at that pace. They're moving at that pace. And you're keeping pace. You're setting the agenda because you're doing all the right things on the product side and the tech side. So it's very easy to say, oh, they got Vera Rubin first. I'll go with them. Oh my God, the team's amazing. We have to optimize the system, not just deal with storage and memory. So this is a shift. I wrote a post about this. This is a new era and all the semiconductors are designing the same way. OpenAI is making their own chips.

>> So this is a market. It's a full-stack market. And in this market, I think the AI era calls for building from first principles. And that's why we are purpose-built. it was really built from the ground up just for AI, not web applications of the past. And I think that's why when clients are with other clouds, they're not able to move as fast and being able to get the performance that they need, they just can't get it or they can't get access to capacity or they can't get the tooling that matches the full cloud stack that they want to work with. And so that's why a lot of customers do choose CoreWeave.

Dave Vellante

>> So I have to share this with you because I wanted to test that in our survey. You got me going, John. Great. This is the director of AI and data science, and he says the most important factor that has kept us to CoreWeave is it's an AI-first infrastructure versus others like AWS where they're not AI-first. Has massive GPU power, which I think is the most important part for us, and it's easy to deploy. So over and over and over, we're able to confirm every— so often the vendor marketing doesn't match the customer reality. And very impressive that the alignment

John Furrier

>> was—by the way, this is good.

>> Things we really focused on. I've been here now 18 months and it was like, go listen to the clients, see what they say first. My first week on the job was actually at the NVIDIA conference, and there I met with over 20 clients just listening to what they thought about CoreWeave. And so a lot of the messaging came from them. We wanted to mirror— we didn't want to say the marketing architecture or fluff. We wanted to be really specific about what mattered.

Dave Vellante

>> And it wasn't rigged— it was a legit survey. It wasn't like 15 customers that CoreWeave gave us. You guys didn't even know we were doing this. So there were a couple that it wasn't all positive. There were some gaps. Some of the folks said, hey, we want to see more granular logging and things like that. But there's work to do. Which is

John Furrier

>> great.That's— it was— we're happy to co-design some real targeted surveys. But I want to just share to end out on the commentary before we look into the people behind the scenes, is that the shared journey that you're on with the tribe in that market is not because it's hyped up. It's because the system of intelligence that's coming out of these production systems, these systems' intelligence, which is the AI. So the race isn't to be, hey, let's go with CoreWeave. The race is who can build the best intelligent production system. And then your customers want to inject that into their business. So it's not a buy versus build. It's we have to get it first, then make it better. Every company does that. Every wave has that moment. So this is kind of a historic moment.

>> We're in the Weave. Yeah.

John Furrier

>> I'm so proud to be here. Thank you for having us. All right. So glad you're here as well. Yeah. So let's do a little post-game review. What's your favorite thing that happened? Who are some of the people you give some shoutouts to? Some folks on your team? Of course. How are you feeling?

>> You feel good? We feel fantastic. When we planned this event, we started— it was a glimmer in the eye about a year ago. We started to sit down and think, could we actually pull a conference off? We're not a large team. As I said, my team was only about 12 people when I joined, and we've been building the team since then and building all the critical capabilities. And why? Because the pace of the market was moving so fast. We need to be able to communicate and understand our clients. We wanted to build a brand. We wanted to build market trust. We wanted to have the technical credibility of an AI cloud, and we wanted to make sure we were connected with accounts that we were gonna be doing business with and building relationships with. And so in that venture, we said, let's do a conference and let's get serious about it. So we put a target, let's get, roughly 2,000 people there, and we think we can do it. how many registrations do we think we would get? And once we started posting the content, we started posting the speakers, we started posting the labs, we started letting people know, yes, we're gonna have, keynotes, we're going to really have some thought leadership in this. We're going to share with you new product announcements. We got over 5,500 registrations and we were blown away. We were very excited about it. We'll have over 3,000 people attending with us this week. And so we couldn't be more excited. This is a great job. It's been amazing. Really, we were so thankful for the partner network that came together. And so I can't say enough about thanking the sponsors and our partners here, the teams. It is not just a marketing communication team that puts this on. The partnership between product and the product announcements, we work together to decide, yes, it started out as a naming exercise with Forge, but ultimately became, let's go build a product. Yeah, let's build a product of consequence to where it'll have a big impact on how people think about agent and application development.

John Furrier

>> Well, it's great to see the success, and yourself and the team. We know that there's some team in New Jersey, some that's come over to New York. We got Palo Alto. Oh,

>> we're everywhere.We got a partnership with sales and they're everywhere as well. So we got product, we got sales, marketing, communications, and the whole executive staff has been so supportive. I think they were surprised at what we were building, and they were really excited about this conference, not just now but in years to

Dave Vellante

>> come.Well, congratulations. Great to be a part of it.

John Furrier

>> Pleasure. Thanks so much, Jean, really appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Jean. All right, this is theCUBE breaking down. This is the end of the CoreWeave's first inaugural flagship conference. It's, again, the industry's first AI infrastructure cloud show. theCUBE is here. Another first for theCUBE. I want to thank everyone on our team that's here producing. Hey guys, appreciate it. Of course, the team back home at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Research, and of course theCUBE team down at the NYSE Wired studio. Thanks for all your support. And for the folks watching, let us know what else we can do. We're doing our part to bring you the data at the fast pace of CoreWeave. Thanks for watching.