Executive Turnover Continues, What's Happening with OpenAI?

Chris Malone left OpenAI last week.

He held the title of Head of Data Center. In the summer of 2026, this is perhaps one of the last positions one would want to see vacant in an AI lab—over 500 towns across America are restricting data center construction, Texas is reviewing all interconnection applications, New York has imposed a year-long moratorium, and every AI company is vying for the same set of power access permits.

Now, the person in charge of this matter has left.

Who is he, and why is his departure notable?

Malone joined OpenAI in March 2025, shortly after the announcement of the Stargate project—a grand self-built data center initiative carried out by OpenAI in collaboration with Oracle and SoftBank.

His background was perfectly suited for this role: prior to joining OpenAI, he spent nearly five years at Meta, excelling as an engineer and leading the company's data center strategy; before that, he spent over a decade at Google, also as a distinguished engineer and senior director, focusing on data center technology.

However, the Stargate project did not go smoothly. OpenAI then made a U-turn, opting to sign deals with cloud providers for computing power instead of constructing its own facilities. Now, it is restarting some of its self-built efforts—not just renting chips but leasing entire facilities. But Malone is no longer leading this effort.

The changes in the organizational structure further illustrate the situation. Malone originally reported directly to CEO Greg Brockman. Earlier this year, the infrastructure department was restructured, with Vice President Sachin Katti taking over the larger group and reporting to Brockman, while Malone and another leader, Adrian Caulfield, became co-leads of a "Data Center Technology Engineering and Design" team.

In July, OpenAI promoted Uday Ruddarraju to "Chief Computing Capacity Officer," reporting directly to Brockman; Brent Mayo, who was hired from Musk's xAI this year, reports to Ruddarraju, overseeing the timely completion of computing projects. Both of these individuals previously worked on Musk's Colossus supercomputer project in Memphis.

In other words, by the time he left, the weight of this position had already been diluted through one round of changes.

OpenAI's official response circumvented this point: "Earlier this year, we reorganized the infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work. We have a strong, highly experienced data center team with the technical expertise required for clear leadership and execution planning."

Why Are So Many People Leaving?

Malone is not an isolated case. He is one of a dozen this year.

The Wall Street Journal's count is at least 12 high-profile employees, while Business Insider tallies 13, with several leaving in the past month. And these are not junior employees but the top seats in the company: Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Product Officer.

The list goes as follows:

Product lead Kevin Weil left in April;

Fidji Simo—Sam Altman's number two overseeing over half of OpenAI's core business—resigned last month after a medical leave;

Longtime executive and COO Brad Lightcap announced this month he's leaving to start a new project;

Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, who was poached from the CEO position at Slack just last December, left after only eight months.

Two weeks ago, OpenAI appointed its second Chief Revenue Officer in less than a year—Dali Rajic, former President and COO of Wiz under Alphabet.

Generally, startup employees only get to cash out their stock when the company gets acquired or goes public, with potential lock-up periods in between. This is what's known as "golden handcuffs": If you want that money, you have to stay.

But in a funding round last year, OpenAI gave employees a financial sweetener, allowing them to sell a total of $6.6 billion worth of shares.

Once the money was in hand, the handcuffs were loosened. Suddenly, leaving became a lot easier.

Google is Also Losing People, Why Isn't Everyone Panicking?

Now, OpenAI is gearing up for an IPO, expected in 2027, with executives eyeing a valuation of over $1 trillion.

At this juncture, any perception of "the top people bailing" will make investors uneasy. Even if Brockman is right and the actual operational impact is minimal, the perception itself is an asset.

Meanwhile, the talent exodus is hitting against two other things already happening: one is questioning of the business model, and the other is competitive positioning. In the second quarter, OpenAI's revenue grew by 18% year-on-year—during the same quarter, competitor Anthropic's revenue more than doubled. OpenAI is now chasing Anthropic in enterprise client sales.

On the other side, Google's recent departures carry significant weight.

Chief Scientist Jeff Dean left the company this month after 27 years to start a new venture, taking three other senior engineers with him. In June, Nobel laureate John Jumper and AI pioneer Noam Shazeer also departed—Shazeer's departure is especially painful as Alphabet had brought him back just two years ago for billions of dollars.

But Google has a deep bench. It acquired the UK's DeepMind 12 years ago, a division that is now the cornerstone of its AI business. It even invested in Dean's new company.

Replacements were swift: Demis Hassabis moved from DeepMind to take Dean's position, while Koray Kavukcuoglu took over the Gemini model and AI research—the latter had been there even before Google acquired DeepMind. Analysts believe Hassabis is a big thinker, and Kavukcuoglu will lean more towards operations, ensuring that profitable AI technology is delivered on time.

For Google, which has recently lagged in AI competitions, this bloodletting might even be healthy.

When it comes to departures, the key difference lies in whether there are people behind.

The poaching side, it's their common supplier

Another personnel news also emerged in the same week: NVIDIA, through a $6 billion licensing agreement, poached over 100 employees from the startup Poolside.

These individuals are expected to join NVIDIA's Nemotron Open Weight Model project, with a clear goal—to create a U.S. counterweight against the recent influx of powerful open-source models from China.

There are two sides to this issue. On one hand is the national security narrative: models released by Chinese companies such as Moonlight and Zhidu have indeed made Washington nervous. On the other hand is the business relationship: NVIDIA has been supplying chips to closed-source developers like OpenAI and Anthropic, and now it wants to use its own chips to create a cheaper, open-source model to compete with its customers.

And this road goes both ways. On the same day the news of Malone's departure spread, OpenAI announced the benchmark results of its in-house chip Jalapeño at the Hot Chips conference, claiming to have surpassed NVIDIA's GB300 in two aspects: throughput per kilowatt and response speed, with 700 watts versus 1400 watts, achieving up to 1.9 times the throughput per kilowatt and 3.6 times lower latency. This chip, developed in collaboration with Broadcom, is dedicated to inference only, with plans for small-scale deployment by the end of this year and full rollout by 2027.

Suppliers are encroaching on customers' territory, while customers are encroaching on suppliers' territory.

However, there is one thing that both sides still need to figure out on their own: those chips ultimately need to be installed in data centers, and the data centers need to be powered. And on OpenAI's side, the person in charge of this has just left.

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