Why I really pushed to talk to OpenAI's Greg Brockman for my latest Fortune story

Hint: I can think of $1.4 trillion worth of reasons

I’ve spent the past few months thinking about Greg Brockman. Yes, that Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, the same guy who was removed from OpenAI’s nonprofit board almost exactly two years ago and the one who suddenly announced a sabbatical in August 2024 — with many wondering whether he would ever return, and in what role.

These days, Brockman is everywhere: Hanging at the White House. Traveling with President Trump to Japan. Helping fund a new $100 million Super PAC pushing back against AI regulation. Most notably, he is all over OpenAI’s massive Stargate data center, with its promised $1.4 trillion build-out measured in dozens of gigawatts.

You might remember I met Sam Altman in Abilene, Texas in September at the company’s flagship Stargate mega data center site. But it seemed like while Altman was the visionary, Brockman was the builder-in-chief.

What was behind this remarkable resurgence? Why was Brockman, famous as OpenAI’s CTO for putting his head down and coding software for days on end, doing tackling tech’s largest physical infrastructure push ever? And is he so AGI-pilled that nothing will stop him from pushing for ever-more compute?

I did end up speaking to Brockman, as well as AMD CEO Lisa Su, OpenAI head of industrial compute (aka Stargate) Peter Hoeschele, and many others for this Fortune deep dive feature story that published today.

The bottom line is that Brockman is both a builder and a believer. And he, as Hoeschele told me, some of the “secret sauce” behind OpenAI’s recent massive deals with Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Oracle, Amazon, and many more.

I really liked talking to Brockman. I wanted more time with him. I feel like I’d love to have one of those podcasts where he’d sit down with me a few hours and he’d just wax eloquently about all things technologist. But still, his unshaken belief in the power of AI scaling laws is concerning. The monumental risks OpenAI and others are taking is breathtaking. I kept wanting to scream, “why?” “why?” “why?”

Instead, I just quietly asked, “why?” Brockman described building AGI as an end-to-end engineering challenge, one that spans everything from how the models are designed to the chips, servers, and data centers that power the training and running of models.

“The fundamental bet is that AGI is possible, and if we are right about that, then it will really change everything,” he said. “In my mind, the real question is, do you believe in continued AI progress?”

As I concluded in my Fortune piece, “Whether those vast complexes are ultimately remembered as glory or folly, Brockman’s imprint will be there — in the acres of cables and racks, the engineering ambition, and the unshaken belief that it was worth building at all.”