Welcome to AI Decoded*, Fast Company‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.*
Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here*. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at* sullivan@fastcompany.com*, and follow me on X* @thesullivan*.*
OpenAI hired Chris Malone to manage its data center build-out in March 2025, just after the company announced its massive Stargate data center project with SoftBank and Oracle, The Wall Street Journal reported. Stargate was unveiled with fanfare in a chummy Oval Office announcement featuring OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman; SoftBank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son; Oracle’s chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison; and President Donald Trump.
Malone, who left OpenAI last week, had already been moved down in the organization. After a reorganization earlier this year, he no longer reported to the president, Greg Brockman, and instead became cohead of a technical engineering team under VP Sachin Katti. In July, OpenAI promoted Uday Ruddarraju to chief technology officer of computing capacity, reporting to Brockman, while Brent Mayo, hired from xAI this year, was put in charge of keeping projects on schedule.
A shuffle in the data center arm of OpenAI’s operation is conspicuous. The exorbitant cost of data centers is a major reason the big AI labs have taken on so much investment money. Labs like OpenAI and Anthropic believe they need massive computing power both to serve customer demand for artificial intelligence apps and services and to support their own R&D, which they hope will eventually produce AI far more intelligent than humans. Meanwhile, OpenAI remains far from profitable and has its sights set on an IPO next year.
And there’s no end in sight. In July, OpenAI raised its projected compute budget to roughly $750 billion through 2030, up from about $600 billion. For much of its history, OpenAI relied on leasing cloud-computing capacity from third parties like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, but later shifted toward owning its own compute infrastructure, the central idea behind Stargate. Now the company is moving back toward a middle ground by leasing entire data center facilities. This month, it signed a 10-gigawatt data center lease in Ohio with SoftBank’s SB Energy that is partly backed by an Nvidia financial guarantee.
OpenAI is committing close to its own valuation in future infrastructure payments, increasingly underwritten by the companies selling it the chips, and it has now cycled through the leadership overseeing that build-out twice in 18 months.
Malone’s exit is one of 13 senior departures from OpenAI in 2026, by Business Insider‘s count. Among them are the chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser; the longtime COO, Brad Lightcap; and the product and business chief, Fidji Simo, Altman’s second-in-command, who stepped down in July.
Bill Gates published an essay of nearly 6,000 words on Wednesday outlining his growing anxiety over how slowly society is responding to the changes AI will bring. He believes AI will permanently eliminate a large share of jobs, put cyberattack and bioweapon capabilities in the hands of people who never had them, and harm children’s development by replacing human relationships. Gates argues these aren’t distant threats, but ones that are already beginning to arrive. “There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era,” he writes. He has some ideas for how society should respond. These three stand out.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America for information about the hedge fund Situational Awareness’s trades, use of leverage, and communications with the banks, The New York Times reports. The AI-focused fund, run by a former OpenAI researcher, Leopold Aschenbrenner, reportedly plunged from about $45 billion to roughly $10 billion in late July. That’s when a tech selloff triggered margin calls and forced the fund to unwind concentrated positions in companies including the memory-chip maker SK Hynix and the AI cloud-computing company CoreWeave. Both stocks have since rallied.
Microsoft’s latest annual report said revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 41% last fiscal year without giving a dollar figure, a prior-year comparison, or any expense or profit data, The Wall Street Journal reports. Microsoft reports Azure earnings in the same segment with its high-margin legacy software business, obscuring the cost of its expensive AI datacenter buildout. That may not sit well with investors who are—rightly—nervous about the “AI bubble.”
Beijing-based Z.ai (also known as Zhipu) announced a new open-weights AI model called GLM-5.3-Flash on Wednesday. It can work with text and images has a huge 1-million-token context window, meaning it can process unusually large amounts of information at once.
Z.ai says it outperforms its previous GLM-5.2 model at roughly a tenth of the price, while running entirely on Chinese AI chips. The company also confirmed that GLM-5.3-Flash is the model that spent the past week at or near the top of OpenRouter and OpenCode leaderboards under the anonymous name Ox Alpha.
Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up**for Fast Company Premium.