OpenAI data center chief exits as 4 executives leave ahead of 2027 IPO

Chris Malone, OpenAI’s head of data centers, departed the company last week, the Wall Street Journal reported, becoming the fourth senior executive to leave ahead of the company’s planned 2027 listing. Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), a core partner in OpenAI’s Stargate data-center venture, saw its shares edge lower Tuesday on the news, reflecting investor concern over strategic continuity in a partnership that underpins Oracle’s long-term cloud infrastructure growth.

Malone joined OpenAI in March 2025, shortly after the company unveiled Stargate — a joint venture with Oracle and SoftBank to build AI data-center capacity at scale. His 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, according to the WSJ report. Analysts have noted that clustering this many C-suite exits in the months before a listing is unusual even by pre-IPO standards.

Before joining OpenAI, Malone was a distinguished engineer at Meta, where he led data-center strategy, and prior to that a distinguished engineer and senior director at Google. His departure caps a period of significant turbulence inside OpenAI’s infrastructure organization. Earlier in 2026, the company reorganized the group: VP Sachin Katti assumed oversight of the broader infrastructure team, reporting to President Greg Brockman, while Malone and Adrian Caulfield became co-heads of a data-center technical engineering team. The internal build-out effort OpenAI is now reviving through whole-facility leases — rather than renting chips from cloud providers, is being led by others, not Malone, per the WSJ.

Other recent infrastructure promotions underscore the reshuffling. In July, OpenAI elevated Uday Ruddarraju to chief technology officer of computing capacity, reporting to Brockman. Brent Mayo, hired from Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, reports to Ruddarraju and is responsible for keeping OpenAI’s computing projects on schedule. Both Ruddarraju and Mayo played central roles in building Musk’s Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis.

Brockman, speaking on CNBC as reported by investor analyst Michael Parekh’s newsletter, sought to downplay the turnover. "I’m a constant, Sam [Altman] is a constant," he said, framing the exits as manageable churn rather than a signal of deeper instability.

The executive reshuffling comes as OpenAI is dramatically expanding its compute ambitions. The company raised its projected spending on computing power to $750 billion through 2030, up from an earlier estimate of roughly $600 billion, the WSJ reported in July 2026. In a separate move this month, OpenAI signed a 10-gigawatt data-center lease in Ohio with SoftBank’s SB Energy. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) agreed to provide a guarantee of up to $105 billion to support that lease, one of the chipmaker’s largest infrastructure-financing commitments, according to Reuters. The Ohio campus’s first phase is expected to come online in 2028.