Darrick Horton

Darrick Horton is founder and chief executive of TensorWave, a company in Las Vegas, Nevada, that rents AI computing power on clusters built from AMD graphics processors. He came to the business from physics research and Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, where he worked on nuclear fusion, and in December 2025, at 28, he was included on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for AI.

Fusion research at Skunk Works

Before he worked on computers, Horton worked on physics. He did NASA-funded plasma physics research and astrophysics research on the LIGO gravitational-wave project, then joined Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works team, where he worked on nuclear fusion, according to a SecureITWorld interview. “My roots in nuclear fusion at Lockheed Martin and NASA-funded plasma physics research have left me with a lifelong fascination for solving big, audacious problems,” he said there. The defense work shaped how he thinks about shipping hardware: “When lives depend on technology working correctly, you develop a different relationship with quality assurance and risk management.” He has also served as president of Engineers Without Borders.

An AMD-only cloud

TensorWave was founded in 2023 and runs its clusters on AMD chips, which Forbes described as a “seemingly impossible mission” of breaking Nvidia’s hold on AI infrastructure, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. “We founded TensorWave to democratize access to high-performance AI computing through open ecosystems,” Horton told SecureITWorld. By late 2025 the company had about 100 employees, half of them in Las Vegas.

Horton told the Review-Journal that TensorWave had grown its capacity tenfold each year and that he wanted to keep doing it. “It’s hard to 10x once. It’s even harder to do 10x three or four or five times in a row,” he said. His stated goal is for TensorWave to be the first company to deploy one million GPUs.