OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions are colliding with a less technical problem: public backlash.
CEO Sam Altman is conceding that Americans are openly hostile to the facilities powering the AI boom, awkward timing for a company both planning to spend $50 billion this year on compute. “Clearly, people hate data centers—right now, at least,” Altman told Time in an interview. “People are pretty negative on AI.”
The week before Altman sat for Time, OpenAI’s head of data centers Chris Malone left the company, the Wall Street Journal reported, as confirmed by CNBC, which obtained a statement from OpenAI saying that he had “recently reorganized” the infrastructure team.
OpenAI spent the past year dramatically expanding Stargate, the infrastructure project it launched with SoftBank early last year with plans to invest as much as $500 billion in the U.S. AI infrastructure. By September 2025, OpenAI had announced six U.S. Stargate sites, and said those facilities—along with its Abilene flagship and ongoing CoreWeave projects—would bring Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity. It has since added a more-than-1-GW Michigan campus, a Georgia project contracted for 3.2 GW of power, and, this month, an agreement to secure approximately 8 GW of IT capacity in southern Ohio.
