Two months after stepping away from one of the biggest jobs in artificial intelligence because of health concerns, Fidji Simo has a new position. The former OpenAI CEO of AGI Deployment is joining the board of AI infrastructure company Nscale as an independent director.
The timing is difficult to ignore. Simo left her full-time position at OpenAI in July after saying a chronic illness had worsened and that she needed to concentrate on her recovery.
Rather than completely cutting ties with OpenAI, Simo transitioned into a part-time advisory role. Now, in September, she is adding Nscale to her responsibilities.
To be clear, sitting on a board is very different from serving as a top executive at OpenAI. Simo’s previous position put her in charge of major product and business operations at one of the most closely watched technology companies in the world, while an independent director isn’t running Nscale’s daily operations or managing its employees.
Someone could reasonably be unable to continue doing the former while still having the capacity for the latter. Even so, it is fair to wonder why Nscale was worth adding to Simo’s schedule only two months after she stepped away from OpenAI to concentrate on her health.
Nscale isn’t some random AI startup. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in London, the company describes itself as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure business that develops and operates AI data centers while providing GPU cloud services to AI labs and enterprises.
Simo specifically pointed to compute as one reason she finds Nscale interesting. “I’ve seen firsthand that access to compute can determine how fast companies can turn AI breakthroughs into products used by millions of people,” she said.
“But the next generation of AI infrastructure won’t be won on compute alone. It will be won by companies that integrate the entire stack – from the physical infrastructure that powers AI to the software that makes it usable at scale – and make that enormous complexity disappear for their customers.”
Nscale founder and CEO Josh Payne, meanwhile, highlighted Simo’s experience building products used by enormous numbers of people. Before joining OpenAI, Simo served as CEO and chair of Instacart, taking the company through its 2023 public listing, and previously spent about a decade at Meta, including running the Facebook app.
Simo isn’t the only recognizable technology executive showing up at Nscale, either. Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former Yahoo president Susan Decker, and former Meta global affairs president Nick Clegg all joined the company’s board earlier this year.
Put those names together with Simo, and Nscale suddenly has an unusual amount of Silicon Valley experience sitting around its boardroom for a company founded only two years ago. That collection of executives makes this appointment more interesting than the typical corporate announcement about a new independent director.
Simo’s move may look strange at first because of how recently she left her full-time OpenAI position for medical reasons. There is no inherent contradiction, however, between needing to leave an extraordinarily demanding executive job and accepting a presumably less intensive board position a couple of months later.
Still, the question I find more interesting is why she chose Nscale. AI companies require staggering amounts of computing infrastructure, and the businesses supplying that infrastructure could become every bit as important as the companies developing the AI models themselves.
Simo has just spent time near the center of that demand at OpenAI. Now she is putting her name and experience behind Nscale while continuing to advise OpenAI.
Maybe this is simply a board appointment involving an executive with valuable experience and enough time to contribute without interfering with her recovery. But with Simo, Sandberg, Clegg, and Decker now sitting around the Nscale table, this two-year-old AI infrastructure company is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook.
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