Anthropic Poaches Google Energy Leader for Data Centre Push

Anthropic has hired Sana Ouji, a senior energy and data centre executive from Google, as the San Francisco-based AI company accelerates its effort to build out a substantial global infrastructure portfolio.

Sana spent more than six years at Google, most recently focusing on data centre energy strategic investments and partnerships.

Her departure is the latest in a string of senior infrastructure hires Anthropic has made from Google.

With top AI talent in short supply, poaching has been a prominent trend in the tech sector over the past year.

Anthropic's latest acquisitions show just how seriously the company is taking its recruitment strategy ahead of what is expected to a significant expansion of its data centre footprint.

'A front row seat to that transition'

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

"After 6.5 years at Google, I'm taking on a new challenge," she writes.

"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."

She 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, meanwhile, came aboard in February, arriving from data centre firm Stack Infrastructure, where he had been Chief Development Officer.

A wave of Google alumni

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.

Anthropic is, in effect, siphoning off a significant volume of Google's infrastructure institutional knowledge into its own organisation.

The sky-high stakes for Anthropic

In October last year, Anthropic signed a deal with Google for cloud access exceeding 1GW, including up to one million of Google's tensor processing units.

This April, that relationship expanded further, with Anthropic agreeing terms with Broadcom and Google for the supply of TPUs representing 3.5GW 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 for those projects.

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.