In a recent interview, Raja Koduri, the head of Intel’s Core and Visual Computing Group, explains what convinced him to take the plunge and move away from AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group to new pastures at Intel. And no, it’s not just for the money. Although Intel does have a lot of that, too.

Raja Koduri has a star-studded CV. The one time Apple graphics director turned AMD RTG boss took a sabbatical from the red team’s service shortly after the AMD Vega architecture launched back in 2017. And it wasn’t long afterwards that it was announced Koduri would be joining Intel to head up the its efforts in the discrete graphics card game.

“When I took a break from AMD my thinking was what am I going to do for the next 10 years?” Koduri says to Barron’s. “Where I landed was we’re in the middle of a data explosion. The amount of data that is being generated in the world is way more than our ability to analyze, understand, and process. What are the technologies that are required for us to be able to keep up with the data and actually do some beautiful, amazing things with this data?