OpenAI Suffers Serious Pre-IPO Brain Drain, Including Its Head of Data Centers

There are two converging sets of reasons for this spate of senior OpenAI executive departures. First, the company 'did the right thing' last year (always a questionable move in tech) and gave employees the ability to sell shares, which made it easier to leave. 

But that impetus has been compounded by OpenAI's arguably deteriorating competitive position relative to Anthropic, Google et al and by the company's financial strategy which remains, to be polite, aspirational. So, execs in the know appear to be taking the money and running while they can, before, their departures imply, it implodes. JL

Asa Fitch and Anissa Gardizy report in the Wall Street Journal:

AI's revolving door has been spinning especially fast of late—enough to raise real concerns about OpenAI losing top talent. OpenAI has been stung particularly hard. At least a dozen high-profile employees

have left this year, including its chief revenue officer, chief operating officer, chief marketing officer and chief product officer. A key executive overseeing OpenAI’s data-center build-out left last week. The departures come as OpenAI is gearing up for an IPO that executives hope will value it north of $1 trillion. Any sense top people are fleeing will concern investors. OpenAI is at least partly to blame. Usually, employees of startups can only cash out once a company is sold or goes public. But OpenAI last year allowd employees to unload $6.6 billion worth of shares. That made leaving much easier. Now the talent flight is compounding other pre-IPO jitters about OpenAI’s business model and competitive position. 

A key executive overseeing OpenAI’s data-center build-out, Chris Malone, left the company last week, according to people familiar with the matter, joining a wave of leadership departures ahead of a planned public offering.  

Malone joined OpenAI as head of data centers in March 2025, shortly after the company announced Stargate, an ambitious effort with Oracle and SoftBank to build data centers to meet its rapidly growing computing needs. 

The Stargate effort got off to a rocky start, and OpenAI shifted toward signing deals with cloud providers rather than developing facilities itself. OpenAI is now reviving some of its internal data-center efforts through projects in which it leases entire facilities, rather than simply renting chips from cloud providers. But other leaders are heading that effort, not Malone, some of the people said.

His departure comes amid a broader exodus at the firm, which is working toward an IPO that is expected in 2027 and racing to catch up to rival Anthropic in sales to business customers. In recent weeks, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, and Fidji Simo, who served as second-in-command to Chief Executive Sam Altman, have all left. 

People change jobs a lot in tech. But AI’s revolving door has been spinning especially fast of late—enough to raise real concerns about OpenAI and Google losing top talent. 

OpenAI has been stung particularly hard. At least a dozen high-profile employees have left this year, including its chief revenue officer, chief operating officer, chief marketing officer and chief product officer. That is quite an exodus, as much as company leaders would like to shrug it off.

“We are so much in the spotlight, so every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise,” co-founder and president Greg Brockman said in a CNBC interview last week.

The departures come as OpenAI is gearing up for an IPO that executives hope will value it north of $1 trillion. Any sense top people are fleeing will concern investors. Even if Brockman is right and the operational impact isn’t large, the optics matter.

OpenAI is at least partly to blame. Usually, employees of startups can only cash out once a company is sold or goes public, potentially after a lockup. But OpenAI threw employees a financial bone in a funding round last year, allowing them to unload $6.6 billion worth of shares. That was always going to test employees’ devotion since leaving suddenly became much easier.

Now the talent flight is compounding other pre-IPO jitters about OpenAI’s business model and competitive position. While second-quarter revenue grew by 18% compared with the prior period, rival Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled. Before joining OpenAI, Malone was a distinguished engineer at Meta, where he led the firm’s data-center strategy. Prior to that, he was a distinguished engineer and senior director at Google focused on data-center technology. 

Malone reported to OpenAI President Greg Brockman until the company reorganized its infrastructure group earlier this year. OpenAI Vice President Sachin Katti took charge of the broader group, reporting to Brockman, while Malone and fellow OpenAI leader Adrian Caulfield became co-heads of a team focused on technical engineering and design for data centers.

“Earlier this year, we reorganized our infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We have a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans.”

OpenAI has made other leadership changes in recent weeks inside the infrastructure team. In July, OpenAI promoted Uday Ruddarraju to chief technology officer of computing capacity, reporting to Brockman. Brent Mayo, whom OpenAI hired from Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, reports to Ruddarraju and is responsible for helping ensure the company’s computing projects are completed on schedule.

Ruddarraju and Mayo both played key roles in building Musk’s Colossus supercomputers in Memphis. Malone’s departure comes as OpenAI is doubling down on securing computing capacity. The firm raised its projected spending on computing power to around $750 billion through 2030, up from a projection of roughly $600 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported in July. Earlier this month, OpenAI also signed a 10-gigawatt data-center lease in Ohio with SoftBank’s SB Energy, which is partly backed by an Nvidia financial guarantee.