OpenAI may have delayed its debut as a publicly traded company to 2027, but the artificial intelligence leader still has big expansion plans in 2026 and beyond.

CFO Sara Friar recently told employees that OpenAI will be a public company in 2027, or possibly sooner, CNBC reported. But in the meantime, the company is working on preparing for a usage inflection that will need an untold amount of computing power.

Earlier this month, Nvidia agreed to provide a guarantee of up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease a data center in Ohio being developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank entity. In the artificial intelligence world, one hand is always washing the other, so Nvidia’s guarantee backs up the $500 million OpenAI and SoftBank each pledged to invest in SB Energy.

That investment is part of the four-year, $500 billion Stargate Project that OpenAI will use to build out AI infrastructure, including data centers, across the world.

The man tasked with overseeing that massive, world-changing project left the company this week, marking yet another high-ranking executive to leave OpenAI recently.

OpenAI data center head leaves company

Just a year and a half after joining the company, Chris Malone, OpenAI’s head of data centers, is leaving the company about a year and a half after joining the company.

Malone spent a decade focused on data center infrastructure at Meta and Google before joining OpenAI last March, but now he becomes the fourth OpenAI executive to depart the company in August alone.

“We recently reorganized our infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work,” OpenAI told CNBC while adding that the company has an experienced team in place to continue the expansion work.

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According to Data Center Dynamics, OpenAI divided its compute and infrastructure teams into three distinct groups in March: designing data centers, commercial partnerships with cloud providers and chip companies, and managing data centers already in use.

Sachin Katti, formerly of Intel, was brought in to manage everything related to Stargate in a role that he continues to hold, according to DCD. Meanwhile, Spas Lazarov, who joined the company in 2025 after previously working for Apple, was named head of data center engineering in January. Former xAI member Brent Mayo has been named head of data center build and delivery.

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OpenAI executive exodus continues

In December, OpenAI appointed Denise Dresser, formerly the CEO of Slack, as its chief revenue officer. On August 13, the company announced that she was leaving the role “to pursue other opportunities,” just eight months into her tenure.

Days prior, chief operating officer Brad Lightcap announced he was leaving the company after nearly nine years with OpenAI. Lightcap said he was leaving to start a new venture.

Fidji Simo joined the company in May 2025. She was considered the company’s second in command behind CEO Sam Altman. But she stepped down this summer, transitioning from her full-time role to that of a “part-time advisor” due to the flare-up of a chronic illness that she says she’s been living with for seven years.

While the departures may appear alarming on the surface, OpenAI president Greg Brockman dismissed those concerns during an interview with CNBC earlier this month, calling the departures not “actually that atypical.”

“I actually think that the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that we are so much in the spotlight, so every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise,” he said.

AI data center opposition gets organized

While Malone has not publicly disclosed the reason for his departure, it has undeniably become harder for tech companies to build out the data center infrastructure they need due to public opposition.

More than 500 counties or municipalities across the U.S. actively restrict or block new data centers from being built, according to a review by Heatmap. While there are more than 3,000 counties across the country, the rate of restrictions has increased in 2026.

The more than 500 counties counted by Heatmap include only those with the “most severe constraints,” including steep setback requirements, noise limits that make operations impossible, and outright bans on permit approvals.

Perhaps most concerning for AI evangelists who have been working to change public perception about the technology, the “overwhelming majority” of those restrictions have been enacted since the beginning of the year.

Nearly 190 have been passed since June 1, and the pace of moratoriums is accelerating, Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta, told Heatmap.

So far this year, more than 50 planned data centers have already been canceled after facing pushback from locals, more than twice as many as were canceled in all of 2025.

Related: Public outcry over data centers has banks recalculating risk