This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI's nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

It wasn't however Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging retired with his woman backmost location successful Oregon, Heyde spent precocious December visiting imaginable information halfway sites crossed the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde near Meta to articulation OpenAI arsenic the caput of infrastructure. His occupation was to crook CEO Sam Altman's ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking retired immense swaths of onshore suitable for expansive facilities that volition yet beryllium packed with almighty graphics processing units for gathering ample connection models.

"My in-between Christmas and New Year's past twelvemonth was really mostly spent looking astatine sites," Heyde, 36, told CNBC successful an interview. "So my household loved that, spot me."

His beingness successful 2025 has lone gotten much intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been softly soliciting and reviewing proposals from astir 800 applicants hoping to big the adjacent question of its Stargate information centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to bid progressively almighty models.

Roughly 20 sites are present successful precocious stages of diligence, with monolithic tracts of onshore nether reappraisal crossed the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said taxation incentives are "a comparatively tiny portion of the determination matrix."

The astir important factors are entree to power, quality to scale, and buy-in from section communities.

"Can we physique quickly, is the powerfulness ramp determination fast, and is this thing wherever it makes consciousness from a assemblage perspective?" helium said.

Heyde leads tract improvement wrong OpenAI's concern compute team, a part that's swiftly go 1 of the astir important groups wrong the company. Infrastructure, erstwhile a supporting function, has present been elevated to a strategical pillar connected par with merchandise and exemplary development.

With accepted information centers astir astatine max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the adjacent procreation of carnal infrastructure is cardinal to controlling the aboriginal of AI.

The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt information halfway requires the magnitude of powerfulness needed for immoderate full cities. Late past month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout successful concern with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

New sites volition person to see each sorts of vigor options, including battery-backed star installations, bequest state turbine refurbishments and adjacent tiny modular atomic reactors, Heyde said. Each tract looks different, but unneurotic they signifier the concern backbone OpenAI needs to scale.

"We've done this fantastic portion of bottleneck investigation to spot what types of vigor sources really let america to unlock the travel that we privation to beryllium on," Heyde said.

A bully chunk of the superior is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to put up to $100 cardinal to substance OpenAI's expansion, which volition impact purchasing millions of Nvidia's GPUs.

Heyde, a erstwhile caput of AI compute astatine Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta's archetypal 100,000 GPU cluster.

In summation to power, OpenAI is assessing however rapidly it tin physique connected a site, the availability of labour and proximity to supportive section governments, according to Stargate's petition for proposal.

Heyde said the squad has made astir 100 tract visits and has a abbreviated database of sites successful late-stage review. Some volition beryllium marque caller builds, and others volition necessitate conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility volition beryllium key.

"The cleanable parcels are mostly taken," Heyde said. "But we knew that cleanable wasn't the extremity — the extremity for america was, fig one, a compelling powerfulness ramp."

Competition is fierce.

Meta is gathering what whitethorn beryllium the largest information halfway successful the Western Hemisphere — a $10 cardinal task successful Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions successful authorities incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the apical extremity of the company's yearly superior expenditure spending scope to $72 cardinal in July.

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up connected a 1,200-acre AI field successful Indiana. And crossed the country, states are rolling retired taxation breaks, powerfulness guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to pull the adjacent large AI cluster.

OpenAI is simply a comparative upstart, having been astir for conscionable a decennary and lone known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT little than 3 years ago. But it's raised mounds of currency from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, successful summation to Nvidia, connected its mode to a $500 cardinal valuation.

And OpenAI is showing it's not acrophobic to pb the mode successful AI. A self-built star field successful Abiliene, Texas, is already live.

While OpenAI inactive leans connected partners similar Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC past week successful Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards cardinal intelligence property, and follows the aforesaid strategical logic that erstwhile drove Amazon to physique Amazon Web Services alternatively than trust connected existing infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there's nary existent playbook erstwhile it comes to AI, peculiarly arsenic companies prosecute artificial wide quality (AGI), oregon AI that tin perchance conscionable oregon transcend quality capabilities.

"It's a precise antithetic bid of magnitude erstwhile we deliberation astir the benignant of transportation that has to hap astatine those locations," helium said.

Some applicants, including erstwhile bitcoin mining operators, offered existing powerfulness infrastructure, similar substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don't ever fit.

"Sometimes we recovered that it's astir bully to beryllium the archetypal enactment successful a community," helium said. "It's a precise bully communicative that we're bringing the information halfway and the infrastructure determination connected behalf of OpenAI."

The 20 finalist sites correspond signifier 1 of a overmuch larger buildout. OpenAI yet plans to standard from single-gigawatt projects to monolithic campuses.

"Any spot oregon immoderate tract we're moving guardant with, we've truly considered the viability and our ain content that we tin present the powerfulness communicative and the infrastructure communicative associated with those sites," Heyde said.

He understands wherefore galore radical are skeptical.

"It's hard. There's nary uncertainty astir it," Heyde said. "The numbers we're talking astir are precise challenging, but it's surely possible."

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