OpenAI's Head of Data Centers Exits Amid Broader Leadership Exodus

Chris Malone, OpenAI's head of data centers, departed the company last week, becoming the latest in a string of senior executives to exit ahead of a planned 2027 IPO. Malone had joined OpenAI in March 2025, shortly after the company unveiled Stargate — its high-profile joint venture with Oracle and SoftBank to build out massive AI computing infrastructure.

Malone's tenure was shaped by turbulence: Stargate got off to a rocky start, prompting OpenAI to pivot toward signing deals with cloud providers rather than building its own facilities. The company is now reviving internal data-center development through whole-facility leases, but that effort is being led by others. Before his OpenAI role, Malone was a distinguished engineer at Meta leading its data-center strategy, and before that held a senior data-center technology role at Google.

The departure is part of a striking leadership drain at the company. In recent weeks, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, and Fidji Simo — who served as Sam Altman's second-in-command — have all left. OpenAI is simultaneously racing to close a sales gap with rival Anthropic in enterprise markets.

Despite the executive churn, OpenAI is accelerating its infrastructure ambitions. The company raised its projected computing spend to roughly $750 billion through 2030, up from an earlier estimate of $600 billion. It also just signed a massive 10-gigawatt data-center lease in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy, partially backed by an Nvidia financial guarantee. Inside the infrastructure team, OpenAI has reshuffled leadership — promoting Uday Ruddarraju to chief technology officer of computing capacity and bringing in Brent Mayo from Elon Musk's xAI, both veterans of building the Colossus supercomputers in Memphis.