What CEOs Are Saying: AI Infrastructure Watch

Insights from the leadership of AMD, Applied Digital, and Elastic

Last week, it felt like I couldn’t go anywhere in public without overhearing people talk about AI.

It’s truly everywhere now, and the demand for computing power is getting intense. So intense that the entire industry seems to be reshaping around how to supply AI needs.

For example, AMD just struck a deal with OpenAI where instead of paying cash for chips, AMD is giving the AI pioneer potentially 10% of the company. Meanwhile, small-town data-center builder Applied Digital says the real bottleneck isn’t even chips anymore but finding places with enough power to plug them in. The company is thus building massive data centers in rural North Dakota and comparing the spending to the Apollo Program. And Elastic, a company that’s been doing enterprise search for 15 years, is discovering that its legacy infrastructure is suddenly critical for making AI actually work.

Three different companies, three different parts of the stack, but the same story: The AI buildout is happening faster than we planned for, and people are scrambling to keep up.

Here’s what the CEOs are saying about it.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

OpenAI Partnership Announcement | October 7, 2025

AMD just (sort of) broke NVIDIA’s stranglehold on AI infrastructure with an unusual deal that reveals how desperate the industry is for computing power, and how creative companies are getting to secure it.