Intel’s top AI executive jumps to OpenAI after just half a year

Sachin Katti, who was handed the job of chief technology officer and head of AI at Intel only six months ago, just walked away from the role to join OpenAI. He confirmed the move on X, writing that he had officially joined the company behind ChatGPT.

Intel issued a statement on Monday, according to Bloomberg, saying that its CEO Lip-Bu Tan would now oversee the firm’s AI efforts directly, adding that AI remains a top strategic focus for the company.

The announcement marks another abrupt leadership shift at Intel, which has been bleeding senior executives since Tan took charge in March.

Katti’s role at Intel came after a company-wide leadership restructure earlier this year. He had joined the chipmaker nearly four years ago, first working in its networking group before being promoted under former CEO Pat Gelsinger.

In April, Tan flattened the executive structure and moved Katti up to CTO and head of AI. His departure after such a short stint is a blow to Intel’s AI ambitions, especially at a time when the company is struggling to compete in the market for data center AI chips.

Tan takes over AI group as Intel battles executive churn

In the official statement, Intel thanked Katti and said: “Lip-Bu will lead the AI and Advanced Technologies Groups, working closely with the team.” The company also said it remains focused on its technology roadmap for AI workloads.

Since March, multiple executives have left Intel, putting more pressure on Tan to steady the leadership structure while trying to fix the company’s foundry business.

Intel has failed to secure a major customer for its contract manufacturing arm, which is supposed to compete with TSMC and others.

While Intel’s CPUs are still used in AI server systems, they operate at a smaller scale compared to the custom-built AI chips driving the current wave of machine learning.

Intel has yet to produce a flagship data center chip that can seriously challenge what Nvidia and TSMC are already shipping. That lack of a breakout AI chip is one of the reasons the company continues to lose talent and miss major opportunities in the booming AI sector. Katti’s exit is the latest symptom of that struggle.

Tan has been actively trying to reshape the leadership bench. Naga Chandrasekaran, who previously headed the manufacturing subsidiary, has now been tasked with managing external relationships with foundry clients.

Intel has also hired people from outside the company to plug the gaps; Kevork Kechichian, formerly at Arm, is now running Intel’s data center unit. But the pace of changes has not yet produced meaningful results.

OpenAI adds Katti as it races to build compute infrastructure

Over at OpenAI, Katti’s arrival comes as the company attempts one of the most expensive infrastructure buildouts in Silicon Valley history.

Greg Brockman, the firm’s president, confirmed on X that Katti would be “designing and building our compute infrastructure, which will power our artificial general intelligence research and scale its applications to benefit everyone.”

The company is investing massive capital into building advanced data centers capable of handling large-scale AI models.

In the last few months alone, OpenAI has signed over $1.4 trillion worth of infrastructure agreements aimed at expanding its computing footprint to match surging demand.

That eye-popping figure has raised serious questions about how the company plans to fund those projects.

At the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the firm was looking to form an “ecosystem” of banks, private equity firms, and potentially even a federal “backstop” to help support chip investment deals.

But by Wednesday night, Sarah was already walking that back. In a LinkedIn post, she wrote, “I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point. As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part.” She insisted OpenAI wasn’t requesting direct federal financial guarantees.

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