In early October, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and AMD CEO Lisa Su made the rounds of TV information exhibits, smiling ear to ear as they introduced a multiyear partnership value tens of billions of {dollars}—one that may see OpenAI deploy lots of of 1000’s of AMD chips throughout its Stargate Venture knowledge middle mega-campuses. The deal represents roughly six gigawatts of computing energy, or about thrice the quantity of electrical energy the Hoover Dam can generate.
Su informed Fortune that Brockman’s insistence on pondering massive was important to creating the deal—which despatched AMD’s inventory hovering 24% the day it was introduced.
“What I really like essentially the most about working with Greg is he’s simply so clear in his imaginative and prescient that compute is the foreign money of intelligence, and his simply maniacal give attention to making certain there’s sufficient compute on this world,” Su stated.
She recalled that the negotiations with Brockman have been completely different from any she’s had with different potential companions through the years. Partnerships like this often unfold in phases, she stated. “We begin on the first stage of the partnership, after which we do one thing just a little larger, after which one thing just a little bit larger.”
Nonetheless, Brockman needed to go massive or go residence. “I believe Greg was like, ‘failure shouldn’t be an choice,’” she stated. “The infrastructure we’re constructing is at a really completely different scale from how regular individuals construct. We’re constructing gigawatts of compute in a really brief period of time. It’s actually about, how will we break the legal guidelines of physics?”
Sam Altman could also be OpenAI’s globe-trotting visionary and public face of the corporate, however it’s Brockman, his longtime ally and cofounder, who has grow to be the corporate’s high-visibility operator. He’s the chief main OpenAI’s aggressive infrastructure buildout, a challenge to which it has already dedicated roughly $1.4 trillion to deploying the equal of 30 gigawatts of compute capability. That additionally makes Brockman the point-person for a high-stakes monetary gamble, provided that the corporate is reportedly at present making solely about $13 billion a yr in income.
All this dealmaking is in service of what Brockman calls “finishing the mission”—reaching synthetic common intelligence, or AGI, that “advantages all of humanity.” In an interview with Fortune, Brockman described constructing AGI as an end-to-end engineering problem, one which spans the whole lot from how the fashions are designed to the chips, servers, and knowledge facilities that energy the coaching and working of fashions.
“The elemental guess is that AGI is feasible, and if we’re proper about that, then it is going to actually change the whole lot,” he stated. “In my thoughts, the actual query is, do you consider in continued AI progress?” Brockman is definitely a believer: “There’s no bend within the scaling legal guidelines,” he stated of the concept for those who construct larger AI fashions, feed them extra knowledge, and prepare them on bigger clusters of AI-specific chips, their efficiency improves in predictable, clean curves. “The factor that’s laborious is execution.”
A exceptional re-emergence
His central function in executing on OpenAI’s infrastructure mission—which he defined consists of constructing and managing the chips, knowledge facilities, software program, and the precise operations to “ship intelligence at unprecedented scale” marks a exceptional re-emergence for an government whose future on the firm as soon as appeared unsure. He had been faraway from OpenAI’s nonprofit board on the time of Altman’s firing and later took a months-long sabbatical starting in August 2024. Media retailers reported that he and Altman had agreed to the sabbatical amid ongoing considerations that his demanding management fashion had created pressure inside groups. It wasn’t clear he would ever come again to OpenAI, or if he did, what function he would have.
However nowadays, Brockman has grow to be ubiquitous. There he’s, with President Trump in Tokyo. There he’s, eating on the White Home. There he’s, pouring tens of millions of his personal cash into Main the Future, a $100 million political motion committee devoted to lobbying towards AI regulation. Behind the scenes, Brockman reportedly helped form OpenAI’s company restructuring right into a Public Profit Company, introduced final week, a transfer that allows the corporate to boost much more capital. And now, OpenAI is, in line with information experiences, laying the groundwork for an preliminary public providing that would worth the corporate at as much as $1 trillion, in what could be the most important IPO ever and a primary for a former nonprofit.
This comeback of types places Brockman on the middle of OpenAI’s most consequential shift but—because it transitions from merely constructing AI fashions to constructing the techniques to run and serve them—what is named inference within the AI discipline. Brockman is main essentially the most bold (and costly) infrastructure buildout in tech historical past, serving because the behind-the-scenes architect translating Altman’s imaginative and prescient into {hardware}, funding, and political capital.
“Greg is a number of the secret sauce…behind truly bringing these [deals] collectively and making companions need to get to bulletins,” stated Peter Hoeschele, an OpenAI government who, as the pinnacle of the Stargate group, experiences to Brockman.
Nonetheless, the story of Brockman’s resurgence isn’t nearly one government’s rebound—it’s about who controls the following industrial revolution. Brockman has grow to be one of many largest energy brokers of the AI period. As OpenAI’s “builder-in-chief,” he sits on the crossroads of AI, power, and capital, orchestrating offers that may form how — and the place — the world’s computing energy is developed and deployed.
Finishing the mission
OpenAI’s constitution defines AGI as an autonomous system that may outperform people at most economically helpful work. However on the firm’s latest Dev Day, Brockman described AGI as a “steady course of… an vital milestone, however not the tip.”
Steady or not, the present path to reaching AGI requires what could be the most important infrastructure construct in historical past. “It actually makes packages just like the Apollo program nearly small as compared, which is a extremely wild assertion,” Brockman lately informed CNBC’s Squawk on the Avenue, including that he believes there shall be financial returns. “That is actually going to be the underpinning of our future financial system and is already exhibiting the promise and profit to individuals’s lives,” he stated.
However the effort has additionally grow to be a lightning rod. Constructing the infrastructure to pursue AGI might finally value trillions of {dollars}—sufficient to reshape energy markets and take a look at the bounds of {the electrical} grid. The surge in demand is already driving up power costs and fueling political backlash as sprawling knowledge facilities flip into election-season flashpoints within the communities the place they’re being constructed. Critics additionally query whether or not demand will proceed to develop at a quick sufficient tempo to justify the funding.
The financing strategies getting used to fund the infrastructure construct out provides an extra dimension of danger. For instance, as a part of its settlement with OpenAI, Nvidia has reportedly mentioned guaranteeing loans the startup would use to construct its personal knowledge facilities—a transfer that would go away the chipmaker on the hook for billions in debt if OpenAI can’t repay. Analysts have additionally raised considerations in regards to the round nature of the deal: OpenAI pays Nvidia money for chips, whereas Nvidia, in flip, takes a non-controlling fairness stake in OpenAI and backstops its loans.
OpenAI’s partnership with AMD, whereas not equally round, is symbiotic—OpenAI has an choice to accumulate as much as a ten% stake in AMD.
Brockman has acknowledged the problem of constructing adequate computing infrastructure to deal with what he calls the “avalanche of demand” for AI, and that inventive financing mechanisms could be needed. Nonetheless, analysts are cautious of how intertwined the main gamers have grow to be. “There’s a wholesome half and an unhealthy half to the AI ecosystem,” Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson, informed NBC in early October. “The unhealthy half has grow to be marked by related-party transactions like those involving these firms,” he stated, which might artificially prop up valuations.
If buyers determine these ties are getting too shut, Luria warned, “there shall be some deflating exercise.” In different phrases, buyers would possibly bail on firms corresponding to Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave, whose fates are deemed too carefully tied up with OpenAI’s.
Brockman as builder
Having grown up on what he has known as a “pastime farm” in North Dakota, Brockman might appear to be an unlikely determine to finish up on the coronary heart of one of many largest technological transformations in trendy historical past. However he has lengthy loved constructing issues—the truth is, his personal LinkedIn bio reads merely: “I like to construct.”
And the drive to unravel complicated issues began early. Robert Nishihara, now CEO of software program platform Anyscale, first met Brockman once they have been youngsters on the Canada/USA Math Camp, an intense five-week program for college kids who “simply love math and are fixing issues all day.” Even then, Nishihara stated, “Greg was clearly one of many smartest individuals there,” Years later, when Nishihara was visiting Harvard as a potential scholar, Brockman, who was already attending, served as a mentor, exhibiting him round campus and taking him to a notoriously tough freshman math class.
Finally, Brockman spent solely a short while at Harvard earlier than transferring to MIT; he then dropped out of college totally in 2010. That was when he joined Patrick and John Collison as on-line fee startup Stripe’s fourth worker, serving as its first CTO and constructing the corporate’s early engineering techniques, usually coding by way of the evening. Stripe was certainly one of tech incubator Y Combinator’s breakout firms, and in 2015, Patrick Collison launched Brockman to Altman, who was president of Y Combinator on the time. That yr, he teamed up with Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and others to launch OpenAI, the place he was, in line with a weblog put up, excited to have “one thing impactful to construct as soon as once more.”
Within the firm’s early years, previous to Microsoft’s first $1 billion funding into OpenAI, Brockman primarily served because the AI lab’s CEO, whereas Altman continued to run Y Combinator. Brockman’s intense work ethic shortly grew to become legend. One former OpenAI engineer recalled a pivotal second in 2020 when the corporate wanted to show it might grow to be a viable enterprise. “Greg principally hacked collectively the primary API one weekend, I believe over Christmas,” the particular person stated, referring to the launch of OpenAI’s first business product — an API, or software programming interface, which let builders plug OpenAI’s language fashions into their very own apps and merchandise.
The previous engineer additionally recalled that when OpenAI was far smaller—round 200 individuals—Brockman had set his Slack to a mode during which he would get a notification for each single message from anyone within the firm, on each channel. “You may be in some random technical thread and Greg would chime in with some extremely knowledgeable and educated thought,” he defined. That stated, it was “successfully not possible” for anybody to match his tempo on something: “So once I was assigning individuals to work with Greg, I selected very fastidiously—since you weren’t going to be sleeping.”
After these sprints, Brockman would disappear for some time. “He’d go tremendous laborious, then go off like a bear and hibernate for a couple of weeks, after which come again,” the colleague stated.
Whereas Brockman took on a much less public-facing function on the firm after Altman grew to become CEO in 2019, to many inside the corporate, Brockman is each the engine and the metronome of OpenAI. “He’s the heartbeat of OpenAI—the one who units the tempo,” stated one other former researcher on the firm. “He has extremely excessive requirements and expects outcomes.”
That depth also can make him impatient. “If one thing’s not transferring quick sufficient, Greg will take it into his personal fingers and work round individuals if needed,” stated one other former OpenAI worker. “He’s very a lot an ends-over-means form of particular person.”
His approach of working with staffers generally precipitated friction. Keach Hagey, in her 2025 ebook The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, instructed that Greg Brockman’s administration fashion at OpenAI drew inside complaints, and that certainly one of two self-deleting paperwork, emailed by Ilya Sutskever to the OpenAI board earlier than Sam Altman’s firing, laid out considerations about Brockman’s “alleged bullying.” The memo — dubbed the “Brockman memo” — has since grow to be central to Elon Musk’s lawsuit towards OpenAI. In an October 1 deposition earlier than a U.S. district court docket, Sutskever acknowledged its existence, and the decide ordered him to provide it as a part of discovery.
In response to Sutskever’s allegations, an OpenAI spokesperson informed Fortune that “These claims aren’t true. Ilya signed the petition asking for Greg and Sam to be reinstated, and the Board’s impartial evaluate additional concluded that he and Sam are the best leaders for OpenAI.”
Right now, Brockman says he stays targeted on constructing—whether or not which means writing software program or main OpenAI’s infrastructure challenge—which he calls “actually the theme of what I do,” even because the stability between technical and strategic work has shifted over time.
Infrastructure from the get-go
From the beginning, Brockman seen infrastructure as central to OpenAI’s mission. Again in 2017, he stated, the corporate started writing down {hardware} projections that all of the sudden dwarfed its early assumptions. “We began to suppose, okay, possibly we’ll want $10 billion value of {hardware},” Brockman recalled. “At that time, you want knowledge facilities.”
Right now, these bodily infrastructure necessities—the chips and the information facilities behind them—function on a staggering scale, with power wants measured in gigawatts. Every gigawatt represents 1,000 megawatts of energy—roughly what it takes to produce 750,000 American houses. “There are only a few individuals on the planet who’ve ever thought of constructing a gigawatt-scale knowledge middle and what that requires,” stated Hoeschele.
Stargate marks OpenAI’s shift from relying largely on leased cloud compute—largely from Microsoft— to committing to its personal large-scale infrastructure, with data-center builds introduced throughout a number of U.S. states together with Texas, New Mexico and, simply final week, Michigan. Additionally it is increasing internationally in international locations like Norway and the UAE.
Hoeschele recalled early debates about whether or not the corporate ought to actually decide to such an audacious funding. “Three years in the past, I saved asking, ‘Okay, how a lot do you suppose we’re actually going to wish?’” he stated. “Greg has all the time been the voice, each behind the scenes and when he must be public, in regards to the scale of compute that’s required to maintain testing and deploying the know-how. We’re going to proceed to make these investments.”
And whereas critics fear in regards to the environmental and financial toll of AI infrastructure, Brockman insists the long-term advantages will outweigh the prices. “On the finish of the day, what this know-how is for is to profit individuals,” he stated. “I believe it’s value actually trying on the fundamentals, to ensure that we’re trying on the proper knowledge – I’ve seen lots of numbers about knowledge facilities and their impacts on communities which might be undoubtedly not correct.”
Nonetheless, he added that he is aware of OpenAI must show its worth to native communities. “That’s actually our focus, to essentially present that it’s truly good to your group, to your life, for there to be a knowledge middle close by. I believe that that’s one thing that we’ll present to individuals over time.”
Brockman’s energy affect
Based on an OpenAI spokesperson, throughout his 2024 sabbatical Brockman was nonetheless in contact with the corporate and following its developments–which included closing a $6.6 billion funding spherical that valued the corporate at round $157 billion. As soon as Brockman returned in November 2024, he appeared newly energized. In an inside memo, he wrote that he had been working with Altman to create a brand new function targeted on “important technical challenges.” Inside weeks, that mandate had a reputation: a brand new group known as Scaling, which Brockman informed Fortune “merged the deep studying engineering of each our analysis and utilized groups.” Scaling’s job, he defined, “is to verify now we have (and may maximally harness) the computing energy we have to prepare and run our fashions.”
This group, he continued, “works on the whole lot from how we prepare our frontier fashions to how we run ChatGPT for tens of millions of individuals. It’s the place a number of the hardest technical challenges reside, as a result of as we make new breakthroughs and push the horizons of our present ones, we continuously must invent new methods to debug, handle, and scale the computing techniques that assist them.”
Simply two months later–the day after President Trump’s inauguration–OpenAI unveiled the Stargate Venture, a three way partnership introduced on the White Home alongside President Trump, Oracle and SoftBank—an audacious public-private plan to take a position as much as $500 billion over 4 years to construct large knowledge facilities and different infrastructure in the USA to energy AI. By July, Brockman, often known as a high recruiter, had poached 4 high-profile engineers away from rivals, together with Spas Lazarov, former director of information middle engineering at Apple; David Lau, former vp of software program engineering at Tesla; Uday Ruddarraju, the previous head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X; Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer from xAI; and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta.
Stargate confirmed the sheer scale of OpenAI’s ambition, nevertheless it additionally made clear that the corporate will get there by way of the connection between Altman’s imaginative and prescient and Brockman’s execution. “That’s the great thing about their partnership,” Hoeschele added. “When OpenAI is at its finest, Sam is laying out our imaginative and prescient and Greg is
making it a actuality, leaning on his technical experience and relationships. He’s working carefully with individuals like Lisa Su and Jensen Huang to make these offers occur.”
That mixture of technical credibility and dealmaking attain has additionally made Brockman an more and more influential political participant. In latest months, he has poured tens of millions of his personal cash into Main the Future, a $100 million pro-AI tremendous PAC backed by Brockman, enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz, and different tech leaders, which helps candidates favoring deregulation and quicker AI deployment.
Brockman was additionally amongst a high-powered group of tech executives who attended a White Home dinner in September, the place he praised Trump for his “optimism” in embracing AI and the large infrastructure buildout required to assist it. The next month, he returned to the White Home for a fundraising dinner geared toward elevating cash for a deliberate $200 million ballroom addition–although an OpenAI spokesperson emphasised that “he attended the October dinner in his private capability, however hasn’t donated to the ballroom effort.” Many view these strikes, nonetheless, as a part of a broader effort to ease regulatory friction across the Stargate build-out OpenAI is main.
Nonetheless, not everybody sees him as absolutely impartial. “My robust sense, primarily based on what I do know from shut associates who have been at OpenAI for years, is that Greg shouldn’t be super-independent from Sam—at the same time as he makes his personal commitments and places his cash in locations that Sam may not,” stated a Washington-based know-how advisor who beforehand labored with Palantir and the federal authorities. “On the subject of OpenAI and the enterprise, Greg is his personal particular person, however he doesn’t go sideways with Sam on firm technique—particularly partnerships.”
The trail ahead is to maintain constructing
At the same time as OpenAI’s ambitions draw scrutiny and criticism—from regulators, rivals, and native communities—Brockman religion in constructing appears unshaken. In a podcast with Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, Brockman requested viewers to think about having one whole Stargate knowledge middle take into consideration one drawback. “Think about it simply desirous about find out how to remedy a Millennium Drawback [one of seven well-known, unsolved complex mathematical problems] or find out how to treatment a particular form of most cancers,” he stated. “That degree of computational energy coupled with the power to experiment and be taught out of your concepts, that’s going to be one thing the world has by no means seen.”
As for the eye-watering spending commitments lately introduced, he lately stated they might pay for themselves. “If we had 10 [times] extra compute [computing power], I don’t know if we’d have 10 [times] extra income, however I don’t suppose we might be that far.”
If Altman stays OpenAI’s evangelist, Brockman is doing a little crusading of his personal, beating the drum in regards to the want for extra computing energy throughout the complete AI trade. “If the market does get up to the demand that we’re actually very loudly attempting to say is coming, not simply from us however from the entire trade, then nice,” he stated throughout OpenAI’s latest Dev Day. “I’d love to not must go and determine find out how to construct power ourselves, however we’re right here to do the mission.”
He stays undaunted by that mission, at the same time as skeptics warn that OpenAI’s audacious buildout dangers changing into a monument to overreach relatively than innovation. Seven years in the past, he informed Fortune, the a part of OpenAI’s mission that required constructing gigantic knowledge facilities would have been only a sketch on paper. Right now, these mega amenities are literally rising out of former ranchland in Abilene, Texas, and rising from the deserted hulk of an auto meeting plant in Lordstown, Ohio, with others already introduced in New Mexico, Wisconsin and Michigan. Whether or not these huge complexes are finally remembered as glory or folly, Brockman’s imprint shall be there — within the acres of cables and racks, the engineering ambition, and the unshaken perception that it was value constructing in any respect.
