Three senior executives who helped build OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate data center initiative are planning to join Meta Platforms, according to a Bloomberg report, in a move that underscores the fierce competition for AI infrastructure talent across Silicon Valley’s biggest players.
Key Departures From OpenAI
Peter Hoeschele, who was instrumental in building the Stargate project, is set to join Meta along with Shamez Hemani, who worked on computing strategy and business development, and Anuj Saharan, another leader from the computing division. The departures come amid a broader leadership restructuring at OpenAI’s infrastructure division, where the company recently appointed former Intel executive Sachin Katti to oversee its Stargate computing groups following a strategic shift toward renting more AI server capacity from major cloud providers.
Meta’s Infrastructure Ambitions
The hirings align directly with Meta’s aggressive AI infrastructure buildout. The company projected 2026 capital expenditures of between $115 billion and $135 billion — nearly double the roughly $72 billion it spent in 2025. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described 2026 as a pivotal year for AI, with investments aimed at what he has called “building personal super intelligence.”
Meta has been constructing several large-scale data centers across the United States and is also evaluating expansion capacity at sites in Texas. The company has separately hired multiple AI researchers from OpenAI for its newly formed Superintelligence team, which is now producing frontier models like the recently launched Muse Spark.
The Talent War Intensifies
The movement of infrastructure talent from OpenAI to Meta reflects a broader reshuffling in the AI industry. Companies with deep capital reserves are competing aggressively to lock in the engineering expertise needed to build computing capacity at unprecedented scale. For Meta, adding executives with direct experience building one of the world’s most ambitious AI infrastructure projects represents a meaningful accelerant to its own buildout plans — and a signal of just how seriously Zuckerberg is treating this moment in AI development.
