OpenAI data-center chief Chris Malone is out

Chris Malone, the executive who ran OpenAI's data centers, has left after about 16 months. The company calls it a reorganization. The wires called it another senior exit on the road to a 2027 listing.

CNBC confirmed the departure after The Wall Street Journal first reported it. No primary source calls it a firing. OpenAI's own account is a restructuring, not a dismissal.

A spokesperson said the company "recently reorganized its infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work." In practice Malone stopped reporting to president Greg Brockman and was moved under vice president Sachin Katti, who now oversees the group. Malone joined in March 2025 from data-center roles at Meta and Google, right as OpenAI's build-out push got going.

The job he held sits on a spending plan few companies could underwrite. OpenAI has told staff it envisions committing roughly $600 billion to compute through 2030. CFO Sarah Friar told employees this month that OpenAI "will be a public company in 2027." The company was last valued around $852 billion.

So the person managing the physical layer of that commitment left in the same stretch that OpenAI is pointing investors toward an IPO.

Malone is one of several senior exits this year, alongside chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, operating chief Brad Lightcap, and product and business chief Fidji Simo. TechCrunch notes that the people who reported to Brockman have been reshuffled into a new bench. Uday Ruddarraju, Brent Mayo, and Spas Lazarov now split the data-center org across strategy, build-and-delivery, and engineering.

Brockman has played the pattern down. He argues OpenAI simply operates so much in the spotlight that "every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn't otherwise." The counter-read, visible in how the wires framed it, is an executive exodus arriving right before a listing. A fast-scaling company can reshuffle leadership and still do it under an IPO clock that turns each exit into a signal.

The compute commitment, the Stargate program, and the data-center bench all sit with other people now. The delivery question is whether the reorg changes the cadence: the 2027 listing timeline, the pace of Stargate site announcements, and whether OpenAI holds or revises that roughly $600 billion compute plan. That plan already includes the physical layer we covered when Nvidia put a $105 billion Ohio backstop behind it.

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