OpenAI Stargate data center buildout infrastructure lead Keith Heyde

It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the vacations. Rather than hanging out together with his spouse again house in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center websites throughout the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to hitch OpenAI as the pinnacle of infrastructure. His job was to show CEO Sam Altman’s bold compute desires into actuality, in search of out huge swaths of land appropriate for expansive amenities that may finally be full of highly effective graphics processing models for constructing massive language fashions.

“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, instructed CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”

His life in 2025 has solely gotten extra intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from round 800 candidates hoping to host the following wave of its Stargate data facilities, AI supercomputing hubs designed to coach more and more highly effective fashions.

Roughly 20 websites at the moment are in superior levels of diligence, with large tracts of land below evaluate throughout the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde mentioned tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”

The most vital components are entry to energy, skill to scale, and buy-in from native communities.

“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he mentioned.

Heyde leads website improvement inside OpenAI’s industrial compute staff, a division that is swiftly grow to be some of the vital teams inside the corporate. Infrastructure, as soon as a supporting operate, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and mannequin improvement.

With conventional data facilities practically at max capability, OpenAI is betting that proudly owning the following technology of bodily infrastructure is central to controlling the way forward for AI.

The energy needs are arduous to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the quantity of energy wanted for some whole cities. Late final month, OpenAI introduced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

New websites must embrace all kinds of vitality choices, together with battery-backed photo voltaic installations, legacy gasoline turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde mentioned. Each website seems to be totally different, however collectively they type the commercial spine OpenAI must scale.

“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde mentioned.

chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to take a position as much as $100 billion to gas OpenAI’s enlargement, which can contain buying thousands and thousands of Nvidia’s GPUs.

Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.

In addition to energy, OpenAI is assessing how shortly it may well construct on a website, the provision of labor and proximity to supportive native governments, in accordance with Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde mentioned the staff has made round 100 website visits and has a brief listing of web sites in late-stage evaluate. Some can be model new builds, and others would require conversions and refurbishments of present amenities. Flexibility can be key.

“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde mentioned. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”

Competition is fierce.

Meta is constructing what stands out as the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion challenge in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the highest finish of the corporate’s annual capital expenditure spending vary to $72 billion in July.

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And throughout the nation, states are rolling out tax breaks, energy ensures, and expedited zoning approvals to draw the following large AI cluster.

OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been round for only a decade and solely identified to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT lower than three years in the past. But it is raised mounds of money from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, along with Nvidia, on its solution to a $500 billion valuation.

And OpenAI is displaying it isn’t afraid to lead the way in which in AI. A self-built photo voltaic campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already reside.

While OpenAI nonetheless leans on companions like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar instructed CNBC final week in Abilene that proudly owning first-party infrastructure supplies a differentiated strategy. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key mental property, and follows the identical strategic logic that after drove Amazon to construct Amazon Web Services fairly than depend on present infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there is not any actual playbook relating to AI, significantly as corporations pursue synthetic common intelligence (AGI), or AI that may doubtlessly meet or exceed human capabilities.

“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he mentioned.

Some candidates, together with former bitcoin mining operators, provided present energy infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, however Heyde mentioned these do not at all times match.

“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he mentioned. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist websites characterize part considered one of a a lot bigger buildout. OpenAI finally plans to scale from single-gigawatt initiatives to large campuses.

“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde mentioned.

He understands why many individuals are skeptical.

“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde mentioned. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”

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