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 enlargement push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the vacations. Fairly than hanging out together with his spouse again house in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential knowledge heart 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 bold compute goals into actuality, searching for out huge swaths of land appropriate for expansive amenities that can finally be filled with highly effective graphics processing items for constructing giant language fashions.
“My in-between Christmas and New Yr’s final 12 months was truly largely spent taking a look at websites,” Heyde, 36, informed 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 following wave of its Stargate knowledge facilities, AI supercomputing hubs designed to coach more and more highly effective fashions.
Roughly 20 websites at the moment are in superior levels of diligence, with huge tracts of land beneath evaluate throughout the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde mentioned tax incentives are “a comparatively small a part of the choice matrix.”
A very powerful elements are entry to energy, capacity to scale, and buy-in from native communities.
“Can we construct rapidly, is the ability ramp there quick, and is that this one thing the place it is sensible from a neighborhood perspective?” he mentioned.
Heyde leads website growth inside OpenAI’s industrial compute workforce, a division that is swiftly turn into one of the crucial 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 growth.
With conventional knowledge facilities practically at max capability, OpenAI is betting that proudly owning the following era of bodily infrastructure is central to controlling the way forward for AI.
The power wants are exhausting to fathom. A gigawatt knowledge heart 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 must embody all types of power choices, together with battery-backed photo voltaic installations, legacy fuel turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde mentioned. Every website appears completely different, however collectively they kind the economic spine OpenAI must scale.
“We have completed this glorious piece of bottleneck evaluation to see what forms of power 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 take a position as much as $100 billion to gasoline OpenAI’s enlargement, 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 rapidly it might construct on a website, the provision of labor and proximity to supportive native governments, based on Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde mentioned the workforce has made round 100 website visits and has a brief checklist of web sites in late-stage evaluate. Some will probably be model new builds, and others would require conversions and refurbishments of current amenities. Flexibility will probably be key.
“The proper parcels are largely taken,” Heyde mentioned. “However we knew that good 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 knowledge heart within the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion undertaking 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 beneath development throughout a tour of the OpenAI knowledge heart 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 following 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. Nevertheless 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 exhibiting it is not afraid to prepared the ground 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 informed CNBC final week in Abilene that proudly owning first-party infrastructure offers a differentiated method. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key mental property, and follows the identical strategic logic that after drove Amazon to construct Amazon Internet Providers quite than depend on current infrastructure.
Nonetheless, Heyde indicated that there is no actual playbook with regards to AI, notably as corporations pursue synthetic basic 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, supplied current energy infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, however Heyde mentioned these do not all the time match.
“Generally we discovered that it is virtually good to be the primary interplay in a neighborhood,” he mentioned. “It is a very good narrative that we’re bringing the information heart and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”
The 20 finalist websites signify section considered one of a a lot bigger buildout. OpenAI finally plans to scale from single-gigawatt tasks to huge campuses.
“Anywhere or any website we’re shifting ahead with, we have actually thought of the viability and our personal perception that we are able to ship the ability story and the infrastructure story related to these websites,” Heyde mentioned.
He understands why many individuals are skeptical.
“It is exhausting. There is no doubt about it,” Heyde mentioned. “The numbers we’re speaking about are very difficult, nevertheless it’s definitely attainable.”
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