OpenAI head of data centers Chris Malone exits amid departures

OpenAI head of data centers Chris Malone exits amid departures

Wed, August 26, 2026 at 3:20 PM GMT+3 2 min read

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OpenAI's head of data centers, Chris Malone, has left the company, adding to a string of senior executive departures at the artificial intelligence lab this year.

TechCrunch first reported his departure. Malone, who brought experience from data center roles at Meta and Google, came aboard in March 2025, and his exit arrives amid OpenAI's sweeping infrastructure expansion — one that envisions committing around $600 billion to compute through 2030, per CNBC.

OpenAI said in a statement that the company had "recently reorganized" its "infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work," adding that it has "a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans." Under the new structure, Malone's reporting line shifted away from OpenAI President Greg Brockman and moved to OpenAI Vice President Sachin Katti, who assumed oversight of the group, according to TechCrunch. Responsibility for data center strategy is now distributed across a handful of leaders: Uday Ruddarraju heads the data center team, Brent Mayo manages the build and delivery program, and Spas Lazarov oversees data center engineering.

Malone's exit is one piece of a broader pattern of attrition at the top of the company. According to TechCrunch, Business Insider put the total count of senior departures in 2026 at 13, with a notable cluster occurring in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser announced she was leaving after nine months on the job and will be replaced by Dali Rajic, who most recently served as president and chief operating officer of cybersecurity company Wiz. Her departure came just days after Brad Lightcap, who spent eight years at OpenAI, including a four-year run as chief operating officer, said he was leaving to start a new venture. Before those exits, product and business chief Fidji Simo stepped down last month to manage a chronic illness, and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch left in April for health reasons.

Brockman has sought to downplay the significance of the turnover, saying in a CNBC interview that he does not think the wave of exits is "actually that atypical." "I actually think that the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that we are so much in the spotlight, so every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn't otherwise," Brockman said.

The departures come as OpenAI prepares for a public market debut. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees this month that the company "will be a public company in 2027." The company is working to justify an $852 billion valuation ahead of that listing.