OpenAI loses fourth senior executive ahead of 2027 IPO

Chris Malone, OpenAI's head of data centers, left the company last week, The Wall Street Journal News Corp ↗ 0.23% reported in an exclusive on Tuesday, making him the fourth senior executive to depart ahead of the AI company's planned 2027 public offering.wsj

Malone joined OpenAI in March 2025, shortly after the company unveiled Stargate, a joint venture with Oracle ↗ 2.06% and SoftBank to build massive AI data-center capacity. Before OpenAI, he served as a distinguished engineer at Meta ↘ 0.87%, where he led data-center strategy, and prior to that held a senior engineering role at Google.investing

A Shifting Infrastructure Strategy

His departure comes as OpenAI has raised its projected computing spending to approximately $750 billion through 2030, up from an earlier estimate of roughly $600 billion, according to the Journal. The company has recently pivoted away from building its own facilities, instead leasing data-center capacity and signing cloud-provider agreements — a strategic shift that appears to have reshaped the role Malone occupied.finimize+2

In a separate move this month, OpenAI signed a 10-gigawatt data-center lease in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy, with Nvidia ↗ 8.74% agreeing to provide a guarantee of up to $105 billion to support the deal, according to Reuters. The first phase of the Ohio campus is expected to come online in 2028.investing

Wave of Leadership Departures

Malone's exit follows the departures of Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, and Fidji Simo, who served as second-in-command to CEO Sam Altman. Analysts have noted that clustering this many C-suite exits in the months before a listing is unusual even by pre-IPO standards.investing

Internally, OpenAI has been reshuffling its infrastructure leadership. VP Sachin Katti now oversees the broader infrastructure team, reporting to President Greg Brockman, while Uday Ruddarraju was elevated to chief technology officer of computing capacity in July. Brent Mayo, hired from Elon Musk's xAI earlier this year, reports to Ruddarraju and is responsible for keeping computing projects on schedule.investing

Continuity Questions

Brockman sought to downplay the turnover in a CNBC appearance. "I'm a constant, Sam is a constant," he said, framing the exits as manageable churn rather than a signal of deeper instability.investing

No successor to Malone has been announced. Bloomberg confirmed his departure through an OpenAI spokesperson on Monday.bloomberg+1