Key takeaways Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman praised Sam Altman as potentially "one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation" for his aggressive data center expansion strategy. Suleyman describ...
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg on Friday, Suleyman shared his views on some of the most prominent figures in AI, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and xAI's Elon Musk.
Suleyman revealed that he maintains regular contact with other top AI leaders, even though many now run competing companies.
The 49-year-old executive, who joined Microsoft in 2024 after co-founding Inflection AI, has a unique perspective on the industry, having previously co-founded DeepMind with Hassabis before Google acquired the company in 2014.
When discussing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Suleyman highlighted the entrepreneur's ambitious approach to building AI infrastructure.
Describing Altman as "courageous," Suleyman pointed to OpenAI's aggressive expansion of data centers needed to power ChatGPT and other AI services.
"He may well turn out to be one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation," Suleyman said, according to Fortune.
"He's certainly achieved a lot. He's building data centers at a faster rate than anyone in the industry, and if he can pull it off, it will be pretty dramatic."
OpenAI has announced plans for massive infrastructure investments.
In September 2025, the company unveiled five new Stargate data center locations across multiple states as part of a $500 billion project jointly developed with Oracle and SoftBank.
The expansion includes sites in Texas, New Mexico, and Ohio, bringing total planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts. According to OpenAI's announcement, the project has secured more than $400 billion in investment over the next three years.
Sam Altman recently disclosed that OpenAI is looking at commitments of approximately $1.4 trillion over the next eight years to build data center capacity.
"Everything starts with compute," Altman stated in a company announcement about the Nvidia partnership. "Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future."
Despite concerns that OpenAI is spending far more than it currently earns, Suleyman expressed confidence in Altman's ability to succeed with this ambitious strategy.
When asked about Elon Musk, Suleyman chose the word "bulldozer" to describe the Tesla and SpaceX founder.
"He's kind of got superhuman capabilities to bend reality to his will and has, you know, a pretty incredible track record," Suleyman said, according to multiple sources, including Fortune and Bloomberg. "And somehow he sort of mostly manages to pull off what appears to be impossible."
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but later split from the company, now runs his own AI startup, xAI, alongside his other ventures, including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
He also owns the social media platform X and has been involved in politics, becoming the top Republican donor in 2024.
Suleyman acknowledged that Musk operates with "a different kind of set of values" but added appreciation for his directness.
"I kind of like that he speaks his mind. He's very unfiltered," Suleyman said in the Bloomberg interview.
The characterization of Musk as a "bulldozer" was deliberate, with Suleyman using it to convey someone with extraordinary determination and an ability to achieve what others consider impossible.
Musk's track record includes revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry with Tesla and making private space exploration viable through SpaceX.
Suleyman reserved particularly warm words for Demis Hassabis, his former DeepMind co-founding partner who now leads Google DeepMind as CEO.
"I think he's a great thinker and he's a good polymath. He's made massive contributions in the field multiple times. He's truly exceptional," Suleyman said, according to Bloomberg.
Despite now competing in the AI space, Suleyman revealed that he and Hassabis remain close friends and stay in regular contact. He recently texted Hassabis to congratulate him on several DeepMind achievements, including work on Nano Banana, Gemini 3, and AlphaFold.
Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside DeepMind colleague John Jumper for creating AlphaFold, an AI system that revolutionized protein structure prediction.
Google DeepMind has also made significant advances with its Gemini AI models, which have prompted competitors, including OpenAI, to reassess their strategies.
In recent public appearances, Hassabis has predicted that artificial general intelligence (AGI) that meets or exceeds human capabilities could arrive by 2030.
"The scaling of the current systems, we must push that to the maximum, because at the minimum, it will be a key component of the final AGI system," Hassabis said at the Axios AI+ Summit in San Francisco last week, according to multiple reports.
Suleyman's comments provide a rare glimpse into the relationships and rivalries shaping the AI industry, where leading figures often balance collaboration with competition in pursuit of technological breakthroughs that could reshape society.
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