There's an assumption in most AI discussions that AI "must" be embarrassingly parallelizable. For example, much as my brain is parallelized, surely an AI would have to be the same way, much as all heavier than air human flight required was a faithful reproduction of bird anatomy (LOL).
There's also a certain assumption that intelligence implies a level of self awareness that most humans don't have therefore AI would be highly self aware...
There's also a whole industry of sophistry devoted to proving no humans are intelligent and IQ as a concept or any other numerical measure of intelligence does not exist and there is no way to compare intelligence, and right or wrong those folks will surely make life difficult for people improving / testing / upgrading an AI, either because they're right or they'll be making political protests.
But is it the right kind of computing power? The human brain is a very different sort of machine, architecturally speaking, from any computer currently in existence. Current computers have a very difficult time dealing with massive, parallel, random data access. Perhaps strong AI requires billions of threads randomly accessing a database which is terabytes in size? That is going to make the memory bus very, very sad.
The difference is that it can use them not for sending low-return spam, but for multiplying its power - even if it doesn't give a qualitative difference, there should be a quantitative difference (how many different tasks it can do at once) when a strong AI gains many orders of magnitude more computing power than any laboratory/datacenter where it was initially created.