Facilities Infrastructure Engineer - Data Center Infrastructure

OpenAI poaches xAI sales head amidst talent war. October 17, 2026 06:01 In a move that signals intensified competition in the AI talent landscape, OpenAI has reportedly hired Graham Simmans, the former head of sales for Elon Musk's xAI. This latest acquisition marks another instance of OpenAI recruiting key personnel from Musk's ventures. OpenAI's strategic hiring spree. According to a report by Bloomberg on October 17th, Simmans, who led xAI's sales efforts from August 2025 and was instrumental in promoting the Grok chatbot to Wall Street clients, will now join OpenAI's cybersecurity business sales team. This follows a pattern of OpenAI actively recruiting from Musk's AI ventures. Simmans' professional background includes approximately eight years at MongoDB before his tenure at xAI. His move to OpenAI's cybersecurity division highlights the growing importance of this sector for the AI giant. Expanding commercial operations. This recruitment is part of a broader strategy by OpenAI to bolster its commercial operations, particularly as it potentially eyes a future public offering. The company aims to increase revenue from enterprise clients and explore new income streams, such as advertising. The talent drain from Musk's companies is notable. In September alone, OpenAI onboarded Brian McCarthy, former president of global revenue and sales at Cursor (a programming automation startup acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion in August), as its Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Ismail Elmas, previously a Senior Vice President for EMEA at Cursor, also joined OpenAI as its Vice President of Sales for the EMEA region. Further strengthening its infrastructure and operational capabilities, OpenAI has also recruited Uday Rudraraju, former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI, to lead its infrastructure and compute business. Brent Mayo, formerly a senior manager for data center construction and infrastructure, has also been brought on board to manage data center construction and delivery. The musk-openai dynamic. The hiring spree occurs against the backdrop of ongoing tension between OpenAI and Elon Musk. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, has previously sued the organization, alleging that its shift towards a for-profit model contradicted its original mission. Although he ultimately lost this legal battle, the situation underscores the diverging paths of Musk's AI ambitions and OpenAI's corporate development. Musk founded xAI as a competitor to OpenAI, later integrating it into SpaceX. The repeated recruitment of talent from these entities suggests OpenAI's aggressive approach to building its commercial and operational teams in a highly competitive AI market. OpenAI's focus on expanding its sales force and infrastructure indicates a strategic push towards commercialization and market expansion. The acquisition of experienced professionals like Simmans underscores the company's commitment to achieving these goals while navigating the complex relationship with its high-profile co-founder.

OpenAI names indian-origin Uday Ruddarraju to lead data center, computing unit. Read Time: 3 mins Ruddarraju joined OpenAI last year and was appointed as chief technology officer for compute in July. Uday Ruddarraju/LinkedIn OpenAI has named former xAI executive Uday Ruddarraju to lead its infrastructure and compute businesses, marking the latest leadership shakeup for its teams focused on expanding data center capacity. Ruddarraju joined OpenAI last year and was appointed as chief technology officer for compute in July. Sachin Katti, who had been overseeing the infrastructure unit, will transition out of his role over the next few weeks and plans to remain as an adviser after that. OpenAI's Sam Altman has said the ChatGPT maker will likely spend trillions of dollars on the physical infrastructure needed to develop new AI models and support wider adoption of the technology. In recent months, the teams charged with sourcing, financing and setting up data center capacity have seen some key departures. Chris Malone, an executive helping oversee the data center build-out, left OpenAI in August. Peter Hoeschele, who played a critical role in OpenAI's high-profile Stargate infrastructure initiative, exited for Meta Platforms Inc. earlier this year, along with two other colleagues. In an interview, Ruddarraju said he expects the latest leadership change to go smoothly given his prior role working with the engineering, construction and technical parts of the infrastructure group. He has also worked with leaders at OpenAI's partners, including Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang. The strategy and business leaders under Katti will also remain in their roles, providing stability, he said. "Sachin has done an incredible job maintaining the commercial partnerships," he said. Now "I have to spend more time on the commercial side." Katti joined OpenAI about a year ago and has overseen several large data center efforts, including an 8-gigawatt project in Ohio with SB Energy and Nvidia, as well as a Georgia site that's the first to be designed and led by OpenAI. "I'm proud of what we've built and have total confidence in Uday and the team to carry it forward," Katti said in a statement. "I'm looking forward to building something new." Katti previously served as the chief technology and AI officer at Intel Corp. before joining OpenAI. He also co-founded two companies while working as a professor at Stanford. Katti had spent far more of his career as an academic rather than an operating executive. The longtime Stanford professor joked in a March interview that he didn't have a real job until he started working at Intel almost five years ago. Since July, Katti had been overseeing an effort called GPT-Infra to use OpenAI models for tasks such as building semiconductors and infrastructure. Katti recently said the company has customers trying OpenAI models to develop central processing units and edge chips. The GPT-Infra work will now fall under the company's chip chief, Richard Ho. (This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Essential Business Intelligence, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice, Daily Fuel, Gold and Silver Prices and Latest Stories - On NDTV Profit.

Grok Voice 3.0 from SpaceXSI outscores OpenAI and Google on speech-to-speech index. Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company SpaceXSI, formerly xAI, today released Grok Voice 3.0, a new version of the speech-to-speech model behind its Voice Agent API. SpaceXSI is pitching the model to businesses that handle customer support and sales calls with voice agents. Independent testing firm Artificial Analysis ranks it first among models of its type. Artificial Analysis, which bases its rankings on reasoning tests, task success and listener votes in blind head-to-head calls, rated Grok Voice 3.0 at 86.9 on its Speech-to-Speech Index. On the same index, OpenAI Group PBC's GPT-Live-1, tested with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model handling the reasoning, scored 83.2, and Google LLC's Gemini 3.8 Live landed at 82.6. Full Duplex Bench, which grades how naturally a model copes with pauses and interruptions, gave the new Grok model 97%. The OpenAI model kept a narrow lead on Tau-Voice, a test built around support calls with heavy accents and background noise, at 74.5% against 71.6%. SpaceXSI says its model got to first audio about 40% faster on that test. A task in Artificial Analysis' Big Bench Audio run cost about 2.5 cents to complete on Grok Voice 3.0, compared with 3 cents on GPT-Live-1 and 5.5 cents on OpenAI's GPT-Realtime-2.1. Outside Artificial Analysis' testing, Grok Voice 3.0 also led for accuracy on ServiceNow Inc.'s open-source EVA-Bench, scoring 74% across more than 200 enterprise scenarios. No model did better with accuracy and customer experience scored together. Nitin Aggarwal, a senior director of product management at ServiceNow, said the model "pairs top accuracy with a natural, responsive conversation." In production, Tesla Inc. vehicles already account for millions of Grok Voice conversations a day. Drivers lean on it to check calendars and answer email. Bigger errands such as booking dinner go through Grok Bot, and its voice mode runs on the new model as well. At Starlink, the SpaceX satellite internet business, Grok Voice answers about 20,000 customer calls a day in several languages. Roughly 70% are resolved without a human stepping in, SpaceXSI said, and one in four sales calls ends in a purchase before the caller hangs up. SpaceX acquired xAI in February. The AI unit was renamed SpaceXAI in July and took on the SpaceXSI name earlier this month. Grok Voice 3.0 is available now in the Voice Agent API at eight cents a minute, or $4.80 an hour, the same price as Grok Voice 2.0. Developers whose agents point to the grok-voice-latest model alias have already been moved to the new version without any changes on their end. Photo: SpaceXSI. A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support its mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE's Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. * 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more * 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni - Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network Are you an AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE financially by buying your AWS services from its Marketplace portal page and links: https://siliconangle.com/aws-marketplace/. About SiliconANGLE Media. SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios - with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange - SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Its new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.