OpenAI hires former Intel AI chief Sachin Katti

Sachin Katti, who was the chief technology and AI officer at Intel, has joined OpenAI, marking another major talent move within the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman in a post on X said, “Incredibly excited to work with him (Katti) on designing and building our compute infrastructure, which will power our AGI research and scale its applications to benefit everyone.”

At Intel, Katti was responsible for leading overall AI strategy and product roadmap, as well as Intel Labs, the company’s relationship with the startup and developer ecosystems, and Network and Edge Group.

“Excited for the opportunity to work with @gdb, @sama and the @OpenAI team on building out the compute infrastructure for AGI! Very grateful for the tremendous opportunity and experience at Intel over the last 4 years leading networking, edge computing and AI,” Katti wrote in a post on X, replying to Brockman’s.

OpenAI has been actively recruiting top talent from major technology firms, including, xAI, Meta, and Tesla, amidst an ongoing AI talent war.

In July, OpenAI poached four top researchers from Elon Musk’s companies xAI and Tesla. These researchers, who had been working on building xAI’s ‘Colossus’ supercomputer, joined OpenAI’s scaling team to work on backend systems and data centres, including the ambitious Stargate project.

OpenAI has also engaged in acqui-hiring, such as hiring the team behind the Xcode coding assistant Alex in September.

The movement of top AI personnel is a two-way street in the highly competitive tech industry. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has aggressively poached talent from competitors, hiring at least seven high-profile AI researchers from OpenAI for its own Superintelligence team, reportedly offering very high compensation packages.

Meanwhile, with Katti’s departure, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan would oversee the company’s AI initiatives, the chipmaker noted.

Tan first joined Intel’s board in September 2022, and was appointed CEO with an effective start date of March 18, 2025. Since Tan’s appointment as Intel chief, the company has announced plans to cut approximately 24,000 employees over the course of 2025 as part of a major restructuring effort. As part of the shake-up, several senior executives have retired or quit.

In September, tech giant NVIDIA announced that it will invest $5 billion in Intel as the two companies announced plans to work together on developing several generations of customised products for data centres and personal computers.