Who is Sachin Katti? IIT-Bombay gradudate who ditched Intel to join OpenAI

Sachin Katti, formerly the Chief Technology and AI Officer at Intel, has transitioned to OpenAI, where he will contribute to the organization's compute infrastructure initiatives. An esteemed graduate of IIT Bombay, Katti spent over four years at Intel, where he played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s artificial intelligence strategy amid fierce competition from rivals such as AMD and Nvidia. OpenAI’s chairman, Greg Brockman, expressed enthusiasm about Katti's new role in a recent post on X, stating, “Incredibly excited to work with him on designing and building our compute infrastructure, which will power our AGI research and scale its applications to benefit everyone.” In the wake of Katti's departure, Intel has announced that CEO Lip-Bu Tan will assume his responsibilities. The company reaffirmed its commitment to AI, emphasizing that it remains a top strategic priority as they continue to execute their technology and product roadmap for emerging AI workloads. Earlier this year, Katti was elevated to lead AI efforts at Intel. His new employer, OpenAI, is known for developing its own chips and significantly relies on advanced chips necessary for running and training AI models. Katti holds a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his tenure at Intel, Katti was a professor at Stanford University, where he earned recognition for his contributions, including the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (honorable mention) and the William Bennett Prize for Best Paper in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He is also the co-founder of Kumu Networks, an AI startup focused on self-interference cancellation technology, established in 2011. His LinkedIn profile indicates he remains active as a co-founder in 2025. Additionally, Katti founded another startup, Uhana, in 2016, which specialized in AI solutions for mobile network optimization and was acquired by VMware in 2019. According to Intel’s profile of Katti, he is a prominent figure in the telecommunications field, having co-chaired the Technical Steering Committee of the O-RAN Alliance and played a crucial role in advancing the adoption of open and intelligent radio-access networks worldwide.