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

Intel Chief Technology and AI Officer Sachin Katti has left the chipmaker and joined OpenAI to work on the ChatGPT-maker’s compute-infrastructure efforts. Katti, who is an alumnus of IIT Bombay, had been working at the chipmaker for over four years and was responsible for leading Intel’s overall artificial-intelligence strategy and AI product roadmap as the company faces increased competition from the likes of AMD and Nvidia.

OpenAI chairman Greg Brockman confirmed the hiring of Katti in a post on X, writing, “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.”

Meanwhile, Intel has confirmed that CEO Lip-Bu Tan will be taking on Katti’s role.

“AI remains one of Intel’s highest strategic priorities, and we are focused on executing our technology and product road map across emerging AI workloads,” Intel said in a statement.

Notably, Katti was promoted to lead the AI efforts at Intel earlier in the year. Katti’s new employer, OpenAI, has also been previously reported to be working on its own chips and is also an important buyer of the new kinds of chips needed to run and train its AI models.

Who is Sachin Katti?

Katti has a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay. He also holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Prior to joining Intel, Katti was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. During his stint at Stanford, Katti was distinguished for his accolades, including the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (honourable mention) and the William Bennett Prize for Best Paper in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

Katti is also the founder of Kumu Networks — an AI startup that works on self-interference-cancellation technology. He founded the company in 2011, and his LinkedIn profile states that he is still involved with it as a co-founder in 2025.

The techie also founded a startup called Uhana in 2016, which developed advanced AI solutions for mobile-network optimisation. It was later acquired by VMware in 2019.

As per Intel’s page dedicated to Katti, he is also an influential leader in the telecommunications industry and has co-chaired the Technical Steering Committee of the O-RAN Alliance and was instrumental in driving the adoption of open and intelligent radio-access networks globally.