The Former Academic Guiding OpenAI’s Trillion-Dollar AI Buildout

For months, OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been talking up plans to spend trillions of dollars on an unprecedented buildout of data centers stocked with advanced chips to power AI.

The task of turning that ambition into a reality now falls in part on Sachin Katti, a recent hire at OpenAI who spent much of his career in academia and likes to say he didn’t have a real job until he started working at Intel Corp. more than four years ago.

Katti, previously Intel’s chief technology and AI officer, joined the ChatGPT maker in November to serve as its head ...