Chris Malone, OpenAI’s head of data centers, has suddenly left Sam Altman’s AI startup, joining a mass exodus of executives from the ChatGPT developer.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Malone joined OpenAI in March 2025, shortly after the company announced Stargate, its data-center venture with Oracle and SoftBank. That project had a rocky start. OpenAI shifted toward leasing computing power from cloud providers instead of building facilities itself, then reversed course again: it’s now reviving its internal data-center efforts, this time leasing entire facilities rather than renting chips from cloud providers. Malone was evidently not leading that push.
His exit adds to a string of high-level departures at OpenAI, including Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, and Fidji Simo, who served as second-in-command to Chief Executive Sam Altman. The departures come as OpenAI works toward an initial public offering expected in 2027 and races to catch up with rival Anthropic in sales to business customers.
Breitbart News recently reported that the company lost its head of ethics after less than a year with the firm:
Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI’s head of ethics and reportedly the company’s only dedicated ethicist, has left less than a year after joining. Her exit follows other recent departures among people responsible for safety and alignment work at the company behind ChatGPT.
Johannes Heidecke, who led OpenAI’s Safety Systems team, announced his departure in July. Josh Achiam, who previously led the company’s Mission Alignment team before becoming chief futurist, has also reportedly left. OpenAI had already disbanded the Mission Alignment team earlier this year.
Individually, each departure could be seen as ordinary turnover at a fast-moving technology company. But with three leaders leaving within weeks of each other, questions have emerged about who inside OpenAI has the authority to say a model has gone too far, particularly as the company builds AI systems capable of working with less human oversight.
An OpenAI spokesperson addressed Malone’s departure and the broader reorganization in a statement: “Earlier this year, we reorganized our infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work.” The spokesperson added, “We have a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans.”
AI giants continue to face turmoil and high turnover as the industry engages in a multibillion-dollar game of chess. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.