Three senior OpenAI executives who played central roles in building the company's Stargate data centre programme have left the organisation and are understood to be joining the same new company, according to a report by The Information.
Peter Hoeschele, who was instrumental in establishing the Stargate initiative, has already departed, alongside Shamez Hemani, who worked on compute strategy and business development, and Anuj Saharan, another senior figure in OpenAI's compute organisation.
The name of the company the three are joining has not been identified.
OpenAI said it does not plan to appoint a replacement for Hoeschele's role, and confirmed it had recently hired Sachin Katti to lead its industrial compute organisation.
The departures compound a turbulent period for Stargate, OpenAI's global programme to expand data centre capacity for training and running AI models, which has projects underway in the United States, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.
OpenAI has paused its planned Stargate data centre in the United Kingdom, citing energy costs and regulatory hurdles, shelving a project that had been announced in partnership with Nvidia, the chip designer, and Nscale, a British data centre developer.
The pullback from the UK follows a broader pattern of OpenAI reining in spending as it prepares for a potential public listing.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company was grateful for the contributions made by the three departing executives and wished them well in what comes next.