Malone stepped into the head of data centers role in March 2025, shortly after OpenAI introduced Stargate, an infrastructure venture partnered with SoftBank and Oracle to meet escalating computing requirements.
Citing individuals familiar with the transition, a report by The Wall Street Journal says that Malone exited last week, adding to a series of high-level executive changes as the AI lab prepares for an anticipated public listing. Chris Malone, a leader guiding OpenAI’s data facility strategy, has departed the company.
The departure comes during a period of executive turnover at OpenAI as the company builds toward a projected 2027 initial public offering and competes with Anthropic for enterprise commercial revenue. The report says that OpenAI has recently resumed aspects of its proprietary facility buildouts by leasing full data center complexes rather than merely renting hardware capacity; however, sources confirmed that different executives are now directing those operations. At OpenAI, Malone reported directly to President Greg Brockman until an internal restructuring of the infrastructure unit earlier this year.
Addressing the restructuring, an OpenAI representative told the publication that the infrastructure division was realigned earlier this year to match operational scale and speed. Following early operational challenges with the initial Stargate plan, the company pivoted toward securing direct capacity agreements with cloud platforms. We have a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans,” an OpenAI spokesperson was quoted as saying. Recent departures across top management include Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, who functioned as direct deputy to CEO Sam Altman.
Prior to his time at OpenAI, Malone worked as an engineer spearheading data centre roadmaps at Meta, following earlier roles as senior director and distinguished engineer driving infrastructure engineering at Google. “Earlier this year, we reorganized our infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work.