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Keith Heyde stands on website in Abilene, Texas, the place OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now main OpenAI’s bodily growth push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the vacations. Moderately than hanging out together with his spouse again residence in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential information middle websites throughout the U.S.
Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to hitch OpenAI as the top of infrastructure. His job was to show CEO Sam Altman’s formidable compute goals into actuality, in search of out huge swaths of land appropriate for expansive services that may ultimately be full of highly effective graphics processing models for constructing giant language fashions.
“My in-between Christmas and New Yr’s final yr was truly principally spent websites,” Heyde, 36, advised CNBC in an interview. “So my household cherished 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 underneath assessment 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, potential to scale, and buy-in from native communities.
“Can we construct shortly, is the facility ramp there quick, and is that this one thing the place it is smart from a group perspective?” he mentioned.
Heyde leads website improvement inside OpenAI’s industrial compute workforce, a division that is swiftly change into some of the vital teams inside the corporate. Infrastructure, as soon as a supporting perform, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and mannequin improvement.
With conventional information facilities practically 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 vitality wants are exhausting to fathom. A gigawatt information middle requires the quantity of energy wanted for some total 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. Every website appears totally different, however collectively they kind the economic spine OpenAI must scale.
“We have performed this glorious piece of bottleneck evaluation to see what sorts of vitality sources truly enable us to unlock the journey that we wish to be on,” Heyde mentioned.
chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to speculate as much as $100 billion to gas OpenAI’s growth, which is able to contain buying hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s GPUs.
‘Good wasn’t the objective’
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 shortly it may well construct on a website, the supply of labor and proximity to supportive native governments, in accordance with Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde mentioned the workforce has made round 100 website visits and has a brief record of websites in late-stage assessment. Some can be model new builds, and others would require conversions and refurbishments of current services. Flexibility can be key.
“The right 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 would be the largest information middle within 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.
The metal body of information facilities underneath building throughout a tour of the OpenAI information middle in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
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 large AI cluster.
OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been round for only a decade and solely recognized to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT lower than three years in the past. But it surely’s raised mounds of money from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, along with Nvidia, on its option to a $500 billion valuation.
And OpenAI is displaying it isn’t afraid to cleared the path in AI. A self-built photo voltaic campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already reside.
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 offers a differentiated strategy. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key mental property, and follows the identical strategic logic that when drove Amazon to construct Amazon Net Providers reasonably than depend on current infrastructure.
Nevertheless, Heyde indicated that there is not any actual playbook in the case of AI, significantly as firms pursue synthetic basic intelligence (AGI), or AI that may probably meet or exceed human capabilities.
“It is a very totally 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, supplied current energy infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, however Heyde mentioned these do not at all times match.
“Typically we discovered that it is virtually good to be the primary interplay in a group,” 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 part certainly one of a a lot bigger buildout. OpenAI in the end plans to scale from single-gigawatt tasks to huge campuses.
“Anyplace or any website we’re shifting ahead with, we have actually thought of the viability and our personal perception that we will ship the facility story and the infrastructure story related to these websites,” Heyde mentioned.
He understands why many individuals are skeptical.
“It is exhausting. There isn’t any doubt about it,” Heyde mentioned. “The numbers we’re speaking about are very difficult, nevertheless it’s actually potential.”
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