In early October, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and AMD CEO Lisa Su made the rounds of TV news shows, smiling ear to ear as they announced a multiyear partnership worth tens of billions of dollars—one that will see OpenAI deploy hundreds of thousands of AMD chips across its Stargate Project data center mega-campuses. The deal represents roughly six gigawatts of computing power, or about three times the amount of electricity the Hoover Dam can generate.
Su told Fortune that Brockman’s insistence on thinking big was essential to making the deal—which sent AMD’s stock soaring 24% the day it was announced.
“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 said.
She recalled that the negotiations with Brockman were different from any she’s had with other potential partners over the years. Partnerships like this usually unfold in stages, she said. “We start at the first stage of the partnership, and then we do something a little bigger, and then something a little bit bigger.”
However, Brockman wanted to go big or go home. “I think Greg was like, ‘Failure is not an option,’” she said. “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?”
