AI infrastructure executives are raking in massive stock windfalls — some are cashing them out

• AI infrastructure firms are paying giant compensation to their senior executives, mostly in stock.
• CoreWeave's top executives sold off more shares than almost any other executive team in the country.
• The generous compensation and stock sell-offs raised concerns from corporate compensation experts.

Executives from CoreWeave, one of the biggest success stories of the artificial intelligence boom, have publicly touted the company's leading position in the AI race and the future windfall expected from it.

Behind the scenes, they've been cashing out of their company stock.

Three of the most senior executives at CoreWeave have together sold more than $1 billion worth of their shares in the first four months of 2026, according to public filings.

Only the c-suites of four other companies in the S&P 500 had similar levels of stock selling during the same period, according to InsiderFinance, which analyzes such purchases and sales among executives.

"It's in the 99th percentile," Rob Hibbard, the co-founder of InsiderFinance, said. "It's certainly eye-popping."

CoreWeave is one of several once-obscure firms involved in AI infrastructure that are minting outlandish fortunes for a crop of under-the-radar executives. The lavish paydays — much of it in stock awards — come as their companies remain unprofitable and are in the midst of enormous, complex projects they have a short track record of delivering. Some executives have been selling off shares at a rapid clip, a move that can appear at odds with the long-term gains they say are ahead.

Michael Intrator, CoreWeave's CEO, sold $138 million of shares in steady increments so far in 2026, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Brian Venturo, a co-founder of CoreWeave and its chief strategy officer, sold $658 million of shares so far in 2026, according to CoreWeave filings. Brannin McBee, another co-founder who serves as the company's chief development officer, sold almost $240 million of stock.

On a recent analyst call held by Coreweave, Paul Meeks, the head of technology research at Freedom Capital Markets, said he asked why senior leaders have aggressively sold shares. Meeks said that McBee, paused for a moment, then said: "We're not talking about that today."

A CoreWeave spokeswoman declined to comment on that exchange.

CoreWeave's stock has seesawed since its IPO at $40 a share last March — rising as high as $184 last summer. At the market's close on Monday, it was trading at $125.50.

Executives are free to sell their stock during periodic, prearranged selling windows intended to prevent insider trading. But large sales can flash an ominous signal to the market, governance experts said.

"If you believe in the viability of the product, ultimately you won't sell your stock because it will have greater value down the road," said Charles Elson, the founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

Elson said that sizable stock sales by corporate insiders can be seen as a "warning sign to investors" that "maybe they know something you don't."

A CoreWeave spokeswoman said that Intrator, Venturo, and McBee are "deeply committed to CoreWeave's long-term growth and execution" and had arranged to sell shares "to manage personal liquidity and diversification."

On April 30, CoreWeave released its first disclosure on executive compensation since going public a little more than a year ago. The filing stated that Intrator, who is 57, earned roughly $33 million in compensation for 2025. Venturo and McBee, who are both 41, made $18.8 million and $12.7 million, respectively. The majority of the payouts to the three men were in stock awards, which will vest in the coming coming years.

Big pay days and big questions

Iren, an Australian-based bitcoin-mining company founded in 2018 that has refocused on building US data centers, paid its brother co-CEOs, Daniel and William Roberts, $72.6 million each — the majority of it in stock — in 2025, the year the company said it would cease the expansion of its mining operations to concentrate on AI infrastructure. The payouts to the men were more than 10 times what they earned in 2024, and their combined compensation was equal to nearly 30% of the company's revenue in 2025.

"When it's a company that is still very young and maybe untested in terms of product income, then that level of compensation is so far off the charts it's hard to understand," said Robert McCormick, the executive director of the Council of Institutional Investors, an organization that provides guidance on corporate governance.

In a public filing from September 2025, the brothers disclosed they had together sold $49 million of shares and were planning to sell another $66.2 million.

"Iren's executive compensation program was approved by shareholders," an Iren spokesman told Business Insider. "Our philosophy is to attract, retain, and motivate high-caliber leaders while driving the creation of long-term shareholder value."

John Todaro, a senior equities analyst at Needham & Company, said he wasn't concerned by the gigantic stock awards at Iren and CoreWeave, nor by the practice of selling off shares, so long as executives held enough stock to remain aligned with shareholders' interests.

"I don't think it's anything that's really at a threshold for us where we're flagging it," Todaro said, pointing to impressive performance by both Iren and CoreWeave.

In November 2025, Iren announced that it had struck its first big AI cloud computing deal with Microsoft, which agreed to pay the company $9.7 billion to lease a data center project Iren is developing in Texas.

In 2025, CoreWeave's revenue grew 168% to $5.1 billion year-over-year, and its contracted future revenue — income it will earn when it delivers data center facilities to customers — rocketed up by $50 billion during the year.

It has announced major AI computing deals with Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

"From our seat, it is very impressive what some of these guys have done in short order," Todaro said about both companies.

Soaring stock awards

Some AI infrastructure executives haven't sold off shares, but have received compensation that appears exorbitant even in a corporate landscape that richly rewards top leaders.

CleanSpark, another crypto-mining company that announced in October it would turn to data center development, paid its CEO S. Matthew Schultz almost $45 million last year, including $37 million in stock and a $5.5 million bonus. Schultz, who previously was the company's CEO from 2014 to 2019, reassumed the position at the beginning of September, shortly before the close of the company's fiscal year on September 30 — meaning he earned his extraordinary payout for less than a month at the helm of the firm.

In 2024, Schultz, who is also chairman of CleanSpark's board, earned about $14 million in total compensation.

The company's outgoing chief executive, Zachary Bradford, earned almost $49 million in compensation for 2025.

Harry Sudock, CleanSpark's chief business officer, told Business Insider that executive compensation had grown rich in competitive sectors like crypto-mining and high-performance computing and that companies, including CleanSpark, had to pay up to compete for top leaders.

"It's more of a reflection of the market and the value that key talent is able to bring," Sudock said. "I think of it less as like, 'does this company or that company have a culture of enrichment' and more so a function of is this market hot and competitive?"

Asher Genoot, the 31-year-old CEO of Hut 8, another crypto-mining firm that has turned to AI infrastructure, reaped nearly $240 million of total compensation in 2025, the vast majority of it in stock awards.

Genoot's pay package last year was worth 23 times what he earned in 2024.