How Recruiters Are Managing Rising Competition for AI Talent

As artificial intelligence companies scale rapidly, the battle for experienced infrastructure talent has intensified. Anthropic's recent recruitment of senior data centre and energy specialists from Google illustrates the lengths to which AI firms are going to secure the expertise needed to support their expansion plans.

The company's latest hire is Sana Ouji, a senior infrastructure specialist who spent 6.5 years at Google before joining Anthropic's newly formed energy team. Her appointment follows a pattern that has seen Anthropic systematically recruit from Google's infrastructure division, bringing across not just individual contributors but entire layers of institutional knowledge.

Announcing her move on LinkedIn, Sana framed the decision as a deliberate step towards greater challenge rather than a straightforward career progression.

"After 6 and a half years at Google, I'm taking on a new challenge," she says.

"The past few years in particular have been transformational for the energy and data centre industry, and to have had a front row seat to that transition at one of the world's leading AI companies has been a true privilege."

Building a team from scratch

Sana joins Ariel Horowitz and Tim Hughes on what Anthropic is calling its inaugural energy team – a designation that speaks to how recently the company has begun formalising this function.

Ariel, who joined in March, previously served as Deputy Director of Grid Modernisation for the US Department of Energy before the department was significantly restructured in April 2025. Tim came aboard in February from data centre firm Stack Infrastructure, where he had been Chief Development Officer.

The composition of this team suggests Anthropic is blending public sector regulatory expertise with private sector operational experience – a combination that could prove useful as AI companies navigate increasingly complex energy procurement challenges.

Systematic recruitment from one competitor

Sana is far from alone in making the crossing from Google to Anthropic. The company's Head of Data Centre Infrastructure, Winnie Leung, is a former Google executive – as is Brett Rogers, who previously led data centre construction at the firm.

Other hires from Google include Liwen Mao, now Anthropic's Data Centre Design Lead, Adam Johnson, the firm's Data Centre Electrical Lead, and Peter Sarossy, a Google veteran of 20 years, who joined in January as a data centre security engineering staff member.

Zach Miller, after 17 years at Google, became Anthropic's Data Centre Operations Manager, and Soheil Farshchian, formerly a Data Centre System Architecture Lead at Google, is also believed to have joined.

This represents more than opportunistic hiring. Anthropic is, in effect, siphoning off a significant volume of Google's infrastructure institutional knowledge. For HR professionals, this raises questions about retention strategies in environments where competitors are actively targeting specific teams and skill sets.

Infrastructure as a strategic priority

The recruitment drive appears linked to Anthropic's infrastructure commitments. In October 2024, Anthropic signed a deal with Google for cloud access exceeding 1 GW, including up to one million of Google's tensor processing units.

In April 2025, that relationship expanded further, with Anthropic agreeing terms with Broadcom and Google for the supply of TPUs representing 3.5 GW of capacity. Separately, the company has pledged to invest US$50bn in US data centres through a partnership with Fluidstack, with Google providing financial backing.

Rival developer OpenAI has not been shy about exploiting the optics of Anthropic's infrastructure position, claiming in an internal memo that Anthropic made a "strategic misstep to not acquire enough compute."

Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei has argued that the calculus is genuinely difficult, warning in February that being even a year out on growth projections, or misjudging the rate of expansion, could be enough to "go bankrupt".

Against that backdrop, the assembly of a dedicated global energy team – and the calibre of names being recruited to it – signals that Anthropic is treating infrastructure not as a back-office function, but as a strategic priority in its own right.