Shopify CEO turned his wine cellar into an AI rack — and uses it to find his most stressful meetings

Shopify CEO turned his wine cellar into an AI rack — and uses it to find his most stressful meetings Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said he didn't have enough wine to fill his cellar, so he converted it into an AI server room. Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Shopify CEO didn't have enough wine to fill his cellar, but he had plenty of uses for an AI system.Speaking with Alex Heath on an episode of the Sources podcast released on Wednesday, Tobi Lütke said he consulted his “inner 16-year-old” before converting the underused room into a home for computing hardware."So now I have a rack cellar, and it has like one of those GB300s from Dell in it," Lütke said. "So it is actually fully training models."The GB300 refers to Nvidia's Grace Blackwell Ultra computing platform, which Dell has built into powerful computers designed to develop and run AI models.Lütke said the setup allows him to run AI locally, working with sensitive information he can't send to an outside lab. The agent researches topics, prepares briefings, and gathers data about his daily life, he said.“I think it's probably the most compelling product I've ever encountered in my life," Lütke said. "It runs a script that sort of makes a collection of all sorts of things, including my Fitbit data, and, you know, obviously has my calendar.""It has a little app. It knows my geolocation," Lütke added. "For my hobby, I do a lot of health-style analysis, but then given that I have all this data, like I have heart rate data for, you know, for this, and I figured out who my most stressful meetings are with."Tech bosses are finding increasingly personal uses for AI. Business Insider previously reported that Google CEO Sundar Pichai uses agents to follow internal discussions and computing usage. Apple CEO Tim Cook uses AI to summarize emails, while OpenAI's Sam Altman has turned to ChatGPT for parenting questions.Lütke has also pushed employees to put AI to work. In a memo made public in April 2025, he said that all Shopify teams must demonstrate why they can't achieve their goals with AI before hiring new employees. Asked by Heath whether he told the people he discovered were stressing him out, Lütke said: “Yeah. Totally.”"It's like: here's the funniest thing I just find out — guess what?" Lütke said. "And then they didn't think it's nearly as funny." Read next Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Katherine Li is a reporter on Business Insider's West Coast business news team. She covers career, the future of work, and how AI is changing hiring practices and workplace trends.Previously, she was a newsroom fellow who wrote international breaking news and produced newsletters for Semafor. Before that, she wrote about climate policies for The Lever, covered the AAPI community for the SF Chronicle as a freelancer, and wrote about the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an intern for The New York Times.She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a graduate of the international journalism program at Hong Kong Baptist University with minors in French and English literature. Email Katherine at katherineli@insider.com and follow her on Bluesky @katherineli.bsky.social. AI Artificial Intelligence Leadership More Productivity Ask My Agent