OpenAI’s head of data centers, Chris Malone, left the company last week, becoming the fourth senior executive to depart in 2026 ahead of the firm’s planned 2027 initial public offering. Malone joined OpenAI in March 2025 and oversaw a critical expansion phase as the company shifted from chip rentals to leasing entire facilities.
His departure follows earlier exits by Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, and Fidji Simo, who held the second-highest role under CEO Sam Altman. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, characterized the turnover as routine, stating in a CNBC interview, “I am a constant, Sam [Altman] is a constant,” while acknowledging the exits as manageable shifts rather than signs of instability.
Malone’s exit coincides with OpenAI’s accelerated infrastructure strategy. In early 2026, the company reorganized its infrastructure group, placing Sachin Katti in a supervisory role over a broader team while Malone and Adrian Caulfield co-led a technical data center engineering team. The restructuring reflects a pivot toward long-term leasing agreements, with Malone’s former responsibilities now distributed across the reorganized structure.
The company’s $750 billion computing power spending projection by 2030—up from a prior estimate of $600 billion—underscores the scale of its buildout. A key component is the Ohio data center project, a 10-gigawatt lease signed this month with SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary. The agreement is backed by a $105 billion financial guarantee from Nvidia, ensuring progress toward the first phase of operations in 2028.
OpenAI’s infrastructure push includes the Stargate joint venture with Oracle and SoftBank, designed to deliver large-scale AI data center capacity. Internal teams, now led by Uday Ruddarraju—promoted to Chief Technology Officer of Compute Capacity in July—and Brent Mayo, a recent hire from Elon Musk’s xAI, are central to executing the leasing-first approach. Ruddarraju and Mayo previously collaborated on Musk’s “Colossus” supercomputer cluster in Memphis, bringing expertise in high-capacity data center deployment.
