OpenAI loses data center chief amid year of executive departures

Chris Malone, OpenAI’s former head of data centers, left the company last week, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Malone, who spent nearly five years at Meta and more than a decade at Google before that, joined OpenAI in March of last year, making his tenure relatively short. He joined not long after the launch of the Stargate Project, a $500 million data center initiative championed by the Trump administration, in which OpenAI — along with Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Microsoft — is considered a key partner.

Why Malone is leaving isn’t entirely clear. In a statement to TechCrunch, OpenAI said it had “recently reorganized” its “infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work,” adding: “We have a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans.” As part of that reorganization, per the Journal, Malone stopped reporting directly to OpenAI president Greg Brockman and began reporting to OpenAI vice president Sachin Katti, who took over leadership of the group. Several other executives are said to be currently overseeing OpenAI’s data center strategy, including Uday Ruddarraju, who leads the data center team; Brent Mayo, who leads the data center build and delivery program; and Spas Lazarov, who leads all data center engineering.

Malone’s exit adds to a string of more than a dozen executive departures this year — Business Insider recently tallied the 2026 total at 13, with several leaving in just the last month, and these aren’t junior employees but some of the company’s most senior seats. Two weeks ago, OpenAI replaced chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, who had been with the company only about eight months; two days before that announcement, it lost Brad Lightcap, one of its longest-serving executives and former chief operating officer, who said he would be “starting something new” without detailing what. About a month before those departures, the company lost Fidji Simo, its de facto second-in-command, who stepped down to recover from a “chronic illness” but remains with OpenAI in an advisory role. The safety and ethics teams have also seen departures: in July OpenAI lost its head of ethics, Chloé Bakalar, and it was reported last week that the company had disbanded its preparedness team, which assessed whether its AI models could pose catastrophic risks. Other leaders have left as their projects were shut down, including Bill Peebles, former head of the now-defunct AI image generator Sora, while chief marketing officer Kate Rouch left in April, reportedly also for health reasons.

Brockman has downplayed the churn, recently saying the intense “spotlight” on the company means “every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise.” But the departures come as OpenAI preps for an IPO originally expected this year that is now reportedly pushed to 2027, with the company undergoing a kind of reputational vetting that comes with any looming listing amid concerns it may be overvalued and that its profitability doesn’t match its investments.

Why it matters

A data center chief’s exit lands at an unusually sensitive moment: OpenAI is racing to execute Stargate-scale infrastructure commitments while facing IPO-adjacent scrutiny over whether its spending and leadership stability can support them.