OpenAI's Executive Exodus: Data Center Chief Latest to Leave as IPO Looms

The company's latest publicly released model, GPT-5.6, is one of the most capable and efficient on the market, and its desktop app for agentic coding and workplace tasks has added about 15 million subscribers in the past two months. OpenAI has already filed confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO, TechCrunch reported.

Since the turn of the year, more than a dozen executives have left, including CEO Sam Altman's top deputy, the chief operating officer, a chief revenue officer, the chief marketing officer, and several team leads. TechCrunch reported that Chris Malone, the company's head of data centers, left last week after joining in March 2024. Some departures were due to health issues; others followed a reorganization as Altman sought to cut expensive side projects and concentrate on revenue-generating opportunities.

OpenAI told TechCrunch that Malone's departure stemmed from a reorganization of the company's infrastructure team, led by Vice President Sachin Katti and reporting to President Greg Brockman. TechCrunch wrote that a senior executive might leave if that executive suddenly found himself several rungs further down the ladder, and that Malone's exit was striking because OpenAI's primary advantage over rivals such as Anthropic or SpaceX is its investment in compute. The company declined to comment on broader changes.

The departures point to Brockman reasserting his leadership. As cofounder and president, he helped build OpenAI's early infrastructure but was relieved of most management responsibilities in 2019, when Altman became CEO. According to Karen Hao's book "Empire of AI," Brockman later played a disruptive role, seeding internal rivalries that helped kick off the 2023 episode in which the board briefly ousted Altman. Brockman took a sabbatical in 2024 before returning. Today, the infrastructure and product teams report to him. "I like to say that everyone reports to Greg at the end of the day," Thibault Sottiaux, who leads the company's API and app offerings, told TechCrunch.

The specter of the IPO hangs over the churn. In June, OpenAI said it had filed going-public disclosures confidentially with the SEC. Public markets would bring capital to a cash-hungry lab but also require disclosing financials at a time when rival Anthropic is planning its own public debut. Anthropic is reportedly profitable, while OpenAI is reportedly seeing losses grow along with revenue. OpenAI's IPO is not expected until 2027; the average company that files confidentially for an IPO reaches the trading floor in about five months, and SpaceX did so in less than two.

Altman has publicly described the past twelve months as bad, and the internal reorganization matches a narrative, TechCrunch said, that the company got ahead of itself with its IPO filing and is now reshaping itself to make more money and carry less dead weight.

TechCrunch also drew a parallel to a familiar startup cycle: founders build a product, then an experienced CEO is brought in to scale the company and prepare it for an IPO. OpenAI had brought in now-departed executives such as Fidji Simo and Kevin Weil, veterans of multiple tech businesses; now Brockman's influence is growing again. Before OpenAI, Brockman was best known for building out Stripe's business. With high-level turnover, OpenAI needs someone to fill the vacuum and will also need to trim costs and boost revenue before the IPO. For both problems, Brockman's influence may be rising at the perfect time.