Google has elevated longtime engineering executive Amin Vahdat to the newly created role of chief technologist for AI infrastructure, positioning him at the center of the company’s race to scale up computing power for its next generation of large AI models. Vahdat, who previously led Google’s data center and networking engineering, will now report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, a signal of how critical hardware and infrastructure have become in the AI arms race.
His appointment comes as the company faces mounting pressure from rivals, including OpenAI and Meta, who have aggressively expanded their AI compute capacity and chip development. Vahdat has been a key architect behind Google’s data-center networking stack and TPU systems, making him one of the company’s most influential infrastructure leaders. His new mandate includes strengthening chip strategy, optimising energy-heavy AI data centers, and scaling global compute supply to handle larger foundation models and multimodal systems.
Industry analysts say the move reflects Google’s shift toward tighter hardware-software integration, a playbook similar to what competitors are now using to boost training speeds and reduce inference costs. With data-center demand skyrocketing and supply chains tightening around GPUs and advanced semiconductors, the company is betting that Vahdat’s track record in distributed systems and cloud networking will help it close the gap.
The company has already been accelerating investments in next-generation TPUs, custom accelerators, and AI-dedicated data-center builds across the U.S. and Asia. Vahdat’s elevation effectively places him in charge of unifying these efforts under a singular, executive-level strategy aimed at maintaining Google’s leadership in scalable AI infrastructure.
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