Chris Malone, who served as head of data centers at OpenAI, left the company last week, the Wall Street Journal reported. Malone joined OpenAI in March of last year after nearly five years at Meta and more than a decade at Google, making his stint at the company relatively brief.
Malone’s arrival came shortly after the launch of the Stargate Project, a $500 million data center initiative promoted by the Trump administration to develop facilities in the United States. OpenAI is listed as a key partner in the effort alongside Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank and Microsoft.
The precise reason for Malone’s departure has not been made fully clear. With an industry-wide rush to build AI infrastructure, the executive overseeing data center strategy is a highly scrutinized role, which makes turnover in that position particularly notable.
In a statement to TechCrunch about Malone’s exit, OpenAI said it had “recently reorganized” its “infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work.” The company added: “We have a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, as part of that reorganization Malone stopped reporting directly to OpenAI President Greg Brockman and instead began reporting to OpenAI Vice President Sachin Katti, who took over leadership of the group.
Other executives reportedly overseeing the company’s data center strategy include Uday Ruddarraju, who leads OpenAI’s data center team; Brent Mayo, who heads the data center build and delivery program; and Spas Lazarov, an industry veteran who leads all data center engineering.
Malone’s exit comes amid a broader wave of senior departures at OpenAI this year. Business Insider recently tallied 13 departures in 2026, with several occurring in the past month. These were not junior staff but senior executives.
Notable recent changes include: two weeks ago the company replaced its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after about eight months on the job; two days before Dresser’s departure announcement, Brad Lightcap, one of the company’s longest-serving executives and former chief operating officer, said he would be “starting something new” without offering details. About a month earlier, Fidji Simo, effectively the company’s second-in-command as product and business chief reporting directly to CEO Sam Altman, stepped down to recover from a “chronic illness” and remains with the company in an advisory role.
OpenAI’s safety and ethics ranks have also thinned: in July the company lost its “head of ethics,” Chloé Bakalar, and last week it was reported that OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team, which evaluated whether models could pose catastrophic risks.
Other departures resulted from project shutdowns — for example Bill Peebles, former head of the now-defunct AI image generator Sora, left after his project was closed. In April the company’s chief marketing officer, Kate Rouch, also departed; like Simo, her exit was reportedly linked to health reasons.
Remaining executives have sought to downplay the significance of the turnover. Co-founder Greg Brockman recently noted that the intense “spotlight” on OpenAI means “every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise.”
Still, the churn has amplified questions as the company prepares for an initial public offering. OpenAI’s IPO, originally expected this year, has reportedly been pushed to 2027. Observers and potential investors are scrutinizing whether the company may be overvalued and whether its profitability aligns with the massive investments going into the lab.
The stream of senior exits has done little to calm those concerns.
