Su instructed 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 love the most about working with Greg is he’s just so clear in his vision that compute is the currency of intelligence, and his just maniacal focus on ensuring there’s enough compute in this world,” Su stated.
She recalled that the negotiations with Brockman had been totally different from any she’s had with different potential companions over time. Partnerships like this normally unfold in phases, she stated. “We start at the first stage of the partnership, and then we do something a little bigger, and then something a little bit bigger.”
Nevertheless, Brockman needed to go massive or go house. “I think Greg was like, ‘failure is not an option,’” she stated. “The infrastructure we’re building is at a very different scale from how normal people build. We’re building gigawatts of compute in a very short amount of time. It’s really about, how do we break the laws 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 change into the corporate’s high-visibility operator. He’s the chief main OpenAI’s aggressive infrastructure buildout, a mission 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 presently making solely about $13 billion a yr in income.
All this dealmaking is in service of what Brockman calls “completing the mission”—reaching synthetic common intelligence, or AGI, that “benefits all of humanity.” In an interview with Fortune, Brockman described constructing AGI as an end-to-end engineering problem, one which spans every thing from how the fashions are designed to the chips, servers, and knowledge facilities that energy the coaching and operating of fashions.
“The fundamental bet is that AGI is possible, and if we are right about that, then it will really change everything,” he stated. “In my mind, the real question is, do you believe in continued AI progress?” Brockman is definitely a believer: “There’s no bend in the scaling laws,” he stated of the concept in the event you construct larger AI fashions, feed them extra knowledge, and practice them on bigger clusters of AI-specific chips, their efficiency improves in predictable, clean curves. “The thing that’s hard is execution.”
A outstanding re-emergence
His central function in executing on OpenAI’s infrastructure mission—which he defined contains constructing and managing the chips, knowledge facilities, software program, and the precise operations to “deliver intelligence at unprecedented scale” marks a outstanding 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 type had created rigidity inside groups. It wasn’t clear he would ever come again to OpenAI, or if he did, what function he would have.
This comeback of kinds places Brockman on the middle of OpenAI’s most consequential shift but—because it transitions from merely constructing AI fashions to constructing the programs to run and serve them—what is called inference within the AI discipline. Brockman is main probably 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 some of the secret sauce…behind actually bringing these [deals] together and making partners want to get to announcements,” stated Peter Hoeschele, an OpenAI government who, as the top of the Stargate staff, studies 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 change into 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 precious work. However on the firm’s latest Dev Day, Brockman described AGI as a “continuous process… an important milestone, but not the end.”
Steady or not, the present path to reaching AGI requires what can be the most important infrastructure construct in historical past. “It really makes programs like the Apollo program almost small in comparison, which is a really wild statement,” Brockman not too long ago instructed CNBC’s Squawk on the Avenue, including that he believes there might be financial returns. “This is really going to be the underpinning of our future economy and is already showing the promise and benefit to people’s lives,” he stated.
However the effort has additionally change into a lightning rod. Constructing the infrastructure to pursue AGI might finally price 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 threat. 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 depart 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 artistic financing mechanisms can be crucial. Nonetheless, analysts are cautious of how intertwined the foremost gamers have change into. “There’s a healthy part and an unhealthy part to the AI ecosystem,” Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson, instructed NBC in early October. “The unhealthy part has become marked by related-party transactions like the ones involving these companies,” he stated, which might artificially prop up valuations.
If traders determine these ties are getting too shut, Luria warned, “there will be some deflating activity.” In different phrases, traders would possibly bail on firms reminiscent of 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 “hobby farm” in North Dakota, Brockman could seem to be an unlikely determine to finish up on the coronary heart of one of many largest technological transformations in fashionable historical past. However he has lengthy loved constructing issues—in truth, his personal LinkedIn bio reads merely: “I love to build.”
And the drive to unravel complicated issues began early. Robert Nishihara, now CEO of software program platform Anyscale, first met Brockman once they had been youngsters on the Canada/USA Math Camp, an intense five-week program for college students who “just love math and are solving problems all day.” Even then, Nishihara stated, “Greg was clearly one of the smartest people 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 troublesome freshman math class.
In the end, Brockman spent solely a short while at Harvard earlier than transferring to MIT; he then dropped out of college fully in 2010. That was when he joined Patrick and John Collison as on-line cost startup Stripe’s fourth worker, serving as its first CTO and constructing the corporate’s early engineering programs, typically coding by way of the night time. Stripe was considered 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 response to a weblog publish, excited to have “something impactful to build once again.”
Within the firm’s early years, previous to Microsoft’s first $1 billion funding into OpenAI, Brockman basically served because the AI lab’s CEO, whereas Altman continued to run Y Combinator. Brockman’s intense work ethic rapidly grew to become legend. One former OpenAI engineer recalled a pivotal second in 2020 when the corporate wanted to show it might change into a viable enterprise. “Greg basically hacked together the first API one weekend, I think over Christmas,” the particular person stated, referring to the launch of OpenAI’s first industrial 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 folks—Brockman had set his Slack to a mode by which he would get a notification for each single message from anyone within the firm, on each channel. “You could be in some random technical thread and Greg would chime in with some incredibly informed and knowledgeable idea,” he defined. That stated, it was “effectively impossible” for anybody to match his tempo on something: “So when I was assigning people to work with Greg, I chose very carefully—because you weren’t going to be sleeping.”
After these sprints, Brockman would disappear for some time. “He’d go super hard, then go off like a bear and hibernate for a few weeks, and then come back,” 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 sets the pace,” stated one other former researcher on the firm. “He has incredibly high standards and expects results.”
That depth can even make him impatient. “If something’s not moving fast enough, Greg will take it into his own hands and work around people if necessary,” stated one other former OpenAI worker. “He’s very much an ends-over-means kind of person.”
In response to Sutskever’s allegations, an OpenAI spokesperson instructed Fortune that “These claims aren’t true. Ilya signed the petition asking for Greg and Sam to be reinstated, and the Board’s independent review further concluded that he and Sam are the right leaders for OpenAI.”
As we speak, Brockman says he stays centered on constructing—whether or not which means writing software program or main OpenAI’s infrastructure mission—which he calls “really 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 considered infrastructure as central to OpenAI’s mission. Again in 2017, he stated, the corporate started writing down {hardware} projections that all of a sudden dwarfed its early assumptions. “We started to think, okay, maybe we’ll need $10 billion worth of hardware,” Brockman recalled. “At that point, you need data centers.”
As we speak, these bodily infrastructure necessities—the chips and the info 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 provide 750,000 American properties. “There are very few people in the world who’ve ever thought about building a gigawatt-scale data center 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. It is usually increasing internationally in nations 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 ago, I kept asking, ‘Okay, how much do you think we are really going to need?’” he stated. “Greg has always been the voice, both behind the scenes and when he needs to be public, about the scale of compute that’s required to keep testing and deploying the technology. We are going to continue 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. “At the end of the day, what this technology is for is to benefit people,” he stated. “I think it is worth really looking at the fundamentals, to make sure that we’re looking at the right data – I’ve seen a lot of numbers about data centers and their impacts on communities that are definitely not accurate.”
Nevertheless, he added that he is aware of OpenAI must show its worth to native communities. “That is really our focus, to really show that it is actually good for your community, for your life, for there to be a data center nearby. I think that that is something that we will show to people over time.”
Brockman’s energy affect
In accordance with 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 centered on “significant technical challenges.” Inside weeks, that mandate had a reputation: a brand new group known as Scaling, which Brockman instructed Fortune “merged the deep learning engineering of both our research and applied teams.” Scaling’s job, he defined, “is to make sure we have (and can maximally harness) the computing power we need to train and run our models.”
This staff, he continued, “works on everything from how we train our frontier models to how we run ChatGPT for millions of people. It’s where some of the hardest technical challenges live, because as we make new breakthroughs and push the horizons of our current ones, we constantly need to invent new ways to debug, manage, and scale the computing systems that support them.”
Simply two months later–the day after President Trump’s inauguration–OpenAI unveiled the Stargate Challenge, 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, referred to as a high recruiter, had poached 4 high-profile engineers away from rivals, together with Spas Lazarov, former director of knowledge 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, but it surely 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 beauty of their partnership,” Hoeschele added. “When OpenAI is at its best, Sam is laying out our vision and Greg is
making it a reality, leaning on his technical expertise and relationships. He is working closely with people like Lisa Su and Jensen Huang to make these deals happen.”
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 help it. The next month, he returned to the White Home for a fundraising dinner aimed toward elevating cash for a deliberate $200 million ballroom addition–although an OpenAI spokesperson emphasised that “he attended the October dinner in his personal capacity, but 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 totally unbiased. “My strong sense, based on what I know from close friends who were at OpenAI for years, is that Greg is not super-independent from Sam—even as he makes his own commitments and puts his money in places that Sam might not,” stated a Washington-based know-how guide who beforehand labored with Palantir and the federal authorities. “When it comes to OpenAI and the business, Greg is his own person, but he does not go sideways with Sam on company strategy—especially partnerships.”
The trail ahead is to maintain constructing
Whilst 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 total Stargate knowledge middle take into consideration one drawback. “Imagine it just thinking about how to solve a Millennium Problem [one of seven well-known, unsolved complex mathematical problems] or how to cure a specific kind of cancer,” he stated. “That level of computational power coupled with the ability to experiment and learn from your ideas, that is going to be something the world has never seen.”
As for the eye-watering spending commitments not too long ago introduced, he not too long ago stated they’d pay for themselves. “If we had 10 [times] more compute [computing power], I don’t know if we’d have 10 [times] more revenue, but I don’t think we would 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 business. “If the market does wake up to the demand that we’re really very loudly trying to say is coming, not just from us but from the whole industry, then great,” he stated throughout OpenAI’s latest Dev Day. “I would love not to have to go and figure out how to build energy ourselves, but we’re here to do the mission.”
He stays undaunted by that mission, whilst skeptics warn that OpenAI’s audacious buildout dangers turning into a monument to overreach slightly than innovation. Seven years in the past, he instructed Fortune, the a part of OpenAI’s mission that required constructing gigantic knowledge facilities would have been only a sketch on paper. As we speak, these mega services 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 might be there — within the acres of cables and racks, the engineering ambition, and the unshaken perception that it was value constructing in any respect.
