Fortune AI reporter Sharon Goldman here, filling in for Alyson. For the most ambitious leaders, there’s nothing more thrilling—or more perilous—than betting big on the future. That describes today’s AI industry to a T, as companies pour billions into data centers, chips, and energy in the race to build ever more intelligent and powerful systems.
That’s why all eyes are on OpenAI’s massive infrastructure buildout—the Stargate mega-data center campuses, the dealmaking with Nvidia (No. 31), AMD (No. 167), and Broadcom (No. 88), and the growing question of whether all that spending is a sign that we’re witnessing an AI bubble about to pop.
Few realize that one person in particular has emerged as the power broker turning OpenAI’s high-stakes gamble into reality: president and cofounder Greg Brockman. While CEO Sam Altman may be OpenAI’s globe-trotting visionary and public face, Brockman—his longtime ally—has become the company’s high-visibility operator. He’s leading OpenAI’s vast infrastructure mission, to which the company has already committed roughly $1.4 trillion to deploy about 30 gigawatts of compute capacity—roughly the electricity used by 25 million homes. It’s an audacious investment for a company generating only about $20 billion in annual revenue.
In my deep-dive profile, I explore how Brockman serves as the behind-the-scenes architect, translating Altman’s vision into hardware, investment, and political capital. His central role as a kind of builder-in-chief to, as he told Fortune, “deliver intelligence at unprecedented scale,” marks a remarkable reemergence for an executive whose future once seemed uncertain. He was removed from OpenAI’s nonprofit board at the time of Altman’s 2023 ouster and later took a months-long sabbatical in 2024.
Just two months after his return, OpenAI unveiled the Stargate Project, a White House-announced joint venture with President Donald Trump, Oracle (No. 87), and SoftBank (No. 320 on the Fortune Global 500)—an audacious plan to invest up to $500 billion over four years to build U.S. data centers and other AI infrastructure. Brockman has been a key negotiator behind many of Stargate’s deals, including a multibillion-dollar chip partnership with AMD. CEO Lisa Su told Fortune that Brockman’s insistence on “thinking big” was essential to making it happen.
But that scale of ambition has also drawn fresh scrutiny: After backlash this week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar clarified comments suggesting the U.S. government could “backstop” the company’s financing deals. That underscores just how high the stakes have become, for OpenAI and for its growing roster of Fortune 500 partners.
—Sharon Goldman, AI reporter
