OpenAI Stargate data center buildout infrastructure lead Keith Heyde
Keith Heyde stands in Texas, where Openai’s Stargate infrastructure construction continues. Heyde, a former president of AI calculation in Meta, is now leading Openai’s physical expansion pressure.
Openai
Keith heyde did not foresee how to celebrate holidays. Instead of hanging out with his wife in Oregon, he spent visiting potential data center sites throughout the USA at the end of December.
Hey he left two months ago Meta To participate in Openai as the president of the infrastructure. His task was to make his ambitious calculation dreams of CEO, CEO, and eventually seek wide land areas for large facilities to be packaged with powerful graphic processing units to create large language models.
36 -year -old heyde, CNBC’ye told, “My Christmas and new year was actually spent mostly to look at the sites.” He said. “So my family loved it, trust me.”
His life in 2025 only intensified.
Since January, Openai quietly requests and reviews the offers of approximately 800 applicants who hoped to host the next wave of AI Supergputing centers designed to train more and more powerful models.
Roughly, 20 sites are in advanced efforts with large terrain roads examined in the southwest, Middle west and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives were “relatively small part of the decision matrix”.
The most important factors are access to power, scaling ability and purchase from local communities.
“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast and this is a logical thing from the community perspective?” he said.
Heyde pioneers the development of the site in the industrial Computee team of Openai, a part of the company, which is rapidly one of the most important groups within the company. Infrastructure, which was once a supportive function, was upgraded to a strategic column equal to product and model development.
When traditional data centers are almost maximum capacity, Openai states that having a new generation of physical infrastructure is the center of controlling the future of the AI.
It’s hard to meet energy needs. A Gigawatt data center requires the amount of power required for all cities. At the end of last month, Openai, Oracle, Nvidia and Softbank in partnership with 17 Gigawatt announced a building plans.
Heyde said that new areas will include all kinds of energy options, including battery -supported solar installations, old gas turbine renewal, and even small modular nuclear reactors. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial spine that Openai should be scaled.
Heyde, “What kind of energy resources we really want to be able to open the lock of the journey we want to see this wonderful bottleneck analysis.” He said.
A good part of the capital comes from Nvidia. The chip manufacturer agreed to invest up to $ 100 billion to fuel the expansion of Openai, which will involve the acquisition of GPUs of millions of Nvidia.
‘It was not the perfect target’
Heyde MetaHe helped control the construction of the first 100,000 GPU clusters of Meta.
According to Stargate’s request, Openai de evaluates how quickly Openai can be built on a site, the existence of labor and its proximity to supportive local governments.
Heyde said that the team made approximately 100 sites visits and a short site list in the late stage review. Some will be brand new structures, and others will require the transformation and renewal of existing facilities. Flexibility will be the key.
“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” heyde said. “But we knew that Perfect was not a target – the purpose for us was a number, a compelling power ramp.”
Competition is violent.
Meta can be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere – a $ 10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, which is fueled by billions of government incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg increased the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $ 72 billion in July.
September 23, 2025, Abilene, Texas, the USA during the Openai Data Center tour in the USA.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Amazon And the anthropic comes together on an AI campus of 1,200 acres in Indiana. And throughout the country, states relieve tax cuts, power guarantees and accelerated zoning approvals to attract the next large set of AI.
Openai is a relative beginning known by the mainstream since it has existed for only ten years and just less than three years ago. However, Microsoft And in addition to Nvidia, Softbank is on the way to a $ 500 billion valuation.
And Openai shows that he was not afraid to pioneer in AI. A self -built Sun Campus is already alive in Texas, Abilene.
Openai is still leaning on the partners ProphecyOpenai Finance Director Sarah Friar, CNBC’ye CNBC last week, the first -party infrastructure to have a differentiated approach, he said. The seller prevents marking, maintains the basic intellectual property and follows the same strategic logic that once directed Amazon to develop Amazon web services rather than relying on the existing infrastructure.
However, heyde said that especially companies are not a real play book because they follow artificial general intelligence (AGI) or AI, which can meet or overcome human capabilities.
“When we think about the type of delivery that should be in these places, a very different order of size,” he said.
Some applicants, including the old Bitcoin Mining operators, transformer centers and modular buildings, such as existing power infrastructure, but heyde said that they are not always suitable.
“Sometimes we found that it was almost beautiful to be the first interaction in a community.” “A very good narrative that we bring to the data center and on behalf of Openai.”
20 finalist sites represent the first stage from a much larger structure. Openai is ultimately planning to be scaled from single Gigawatt projects to large campuses.
Heyde, “Any place or any site we are moving forward, we really thought about the vitality and our own belief that we can present the story of power and infrastructure associated with these sites.” He said.
He understands why many people are skeptical.
“It’s hard. No doubt,” heyde said. “The numbers we are talking about are very difficult, but it is absolutely possible.”
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