OpenAI Stargate information middle buildout infrastructure lead Keith Heyde

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

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to affix OpenAI as the pinnacle of infrastructure. His job was to show CEO Sam Altman’s formidable compute desires into actuality, searching for out huge swaths of land appropriate for expansive amenities that can finally be full of highly effective graphics processing items for constructing giant language fashions.

“My in-between Christmas and New 12 months’s final yr was truly largely spent taking a look at websites,” Heyde, 36, advised CNBC in an interview. “So my household liked that, belief 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 subsequent wave of its Stargate information facilities, AI supercomputing hubs designed to coach more and more highly effective fashions.

Roughly 20 websites are actually in superior levels of diligence, with huge tracts of land beneath evaluation throughout the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde mentioned tax incentives are “a comparatively small a part of the choice matrix.”

Crucial elements are entry to energy, capability to scale, and buy-in from native communities.

“Can we construct rapidly, is the facility ramp there quick, and is that this one thing the place it is sensible from a neighborhood perspective?” he mentioned.

Heyde leads web site growth inside OpenAI’s industrial compute workforce, a division that is swiftly turn into one of the crucial essential 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 growth.

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

The power wants are onerous to fathom. A gigawatt information middle requires the quantity of energy wanted for some complete cities. Late final month, OpenAI introduced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

New websites should embrace all kinds of power choices, together with battery-backed photo voltaic installations, legacy gasoline turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde mentioned. Every web site appears to be like completely different, however collectively they kind the commercial spine OpenAI must scale.

“We have completed this glorious piece of bottleneck evaluation to see what varieties of power sources truly permit us to unlock the journey that we wish to be on,” Heyde mentioned.

A very good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to take a position as much as $100 billion to gasoline OpenAI’s growth, 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.

Along with energy, OpenAI is assessing how rapidly it will probably construct on a web site, the provision of labor and proximity to supportive native governments, in response to Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde mentioned the workforce has made round 100 web site visits and has a brief checklist of websites in late-stage evaluation. Some will probably be model new builds, and others would require conversions and refurbishments of present amenities. Flexibility will probably be key.

“The proper parcels are largely taken,” Heyde mentioned. “However we knew that excellent wasn’t the objective — the objective for us was, primary, a compelling energy ramp.”

Competitors is fierce.

Meta is constructing what stands out as the largest information middle within the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion mission 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 subsequent massive 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. However it’s raised mounds of money from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, along with Nvidia, on its approach to a $500 billion valuation.

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

Whereas OpenAI nonetheless leans on companions like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Monetary Officer Sarah Friar advised 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 Internet Companies reasonably than depend on present infrastructure.

Nonetheless, Heyde indicated that there is not any actual playbook with regards to AI, notably as firms pursue synthetic normal intelligence (AGI), or AI that may probably meet or exceed human capabilities.

“It is a very completely different order of magnitude after we take into consideration the kind of supply that has to occur at these places,” 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.

“Typically we discovered that it is nearly good to be the primary interplay in a neighborhood,” he mentioned. “It is a very good narrative that we’re bringing the information middle and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist websites characterize section one in all a a lot bigger buildout. OpenAI finally plans to scale from single-gigawatt initiatives to huge campuses.

“Anyplace or any web site we’re transferring ahead with, we have actually thought-about the viability and our personal perception that we are able to ship the facility story and the infrastructure story related to these websites,” Heyde mentioned.

He understands why many individuals are skeptical.

“It is onerous. There isn’t any doubt about it,” Heyde mentioned. “The numbers we’re speaking about are very difficult, but it surely’s definitely doable.”

WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits