AI Talent War Continues Heating: OpenAI Recruits Tesla’s VP and xAI Infrastructure Experts as AI Companies Compete for Elite Talent

OpenAI Hires Away Tesla and xAI Talent Amid Fierce AI Engineering Race

The race to secure top AI talent is heating up—and OpenAI just made a bold move.

In a tightly contested talent war, the company has brought on four high-profile engineers from rivals Tesla, xAI, X, and Meta to strengthen its internal infrastructure unit, known as the scaling team.

The hires were first announced via a company-wide Slack message from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and later confirmed publicly in a post on X.

The move comes as major players in the industry scramble to outpace each other in building the most capable AI systems—and the hardware and software infrastructure that powers them.

Who Are The Engineers OpenAI Has Poached?

Among the new recruits is David Lau, who served as Tesla’s vice president of software engineering.

Lau, who had been at Tesla since 2017, oversaw critical divisions such as firmware, platforms, and systems integration.

Joining him is Uday Ruddarraju, the former head of infrastructure engineering at both Elon Musk’s xAI and the social platform X.

Mike Dalton, another infrastructure engineer from xAI, and Angela Fan, a researcher from Meta, round out the hires.

Both Ruddarraju and Dalton were instrumental in building Colossus, the xAI supercomputer made up of over 200,000 GPUs.

That kind of engineering talent is key to OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions, which are becoming central to the next phase of AI development.

OpenAI’s Scaling Team Gains Firepower

The team these engineers are joining—OpenAI’s scaling unit—manages the backend systems that make large-scale AI training possible, including data centres and hardware platforms.

This group is also behind Stargate, OpenAI’s ambitious infrastructure venture aimed at pushing the limits of AI training.

Ruddarraju said in a statement to Wired,

“Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and OpenAI has already demonstrated this successfully. Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly matches the ambitious, systems-level challenges I love taking on.”

Lau, now departing Tesla for this next chapter, added:

“It has become incredibly clear to me that accelerating progress towards safe, well-aligned artificial general intelligence is the most rewarding mission I could imagine for the next chapter of my career.”

Meta And OpenAI Locked In Talent Tug-Of-War

These hires don’t come in a vacuum.

The AI industry is currently seeing intense competition, not just in research breakthroughs, but in recruiting the brains behind them.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched his own aggressive hiring push, reportedly offering lucrative deals—some totalling around $100 million—to lure talent away from OpenAI.

OpenAI’s head of recruiting, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, openly criticised Meta’s approach, posting on X:

“It’s unethical (and reeks of desperation) to give people “exploding offers” that expire within hours, and to ask them to sign before they even have a chance to tell their current manager. Meta, you know better than this. Put people first.”

Meta’s efforts have already led to high-profile defections from OpenAI, including researcher Yuanzhi Li, who joined Zuckerberg’s new “superintelligence” team on 7 July, according to Bloomberg.

Tensions Between OpenAI And Elon Musk Simmer

The latest hires may also further strain relations between OpenAI and Elon Musk, who helped co-found OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the board in 2018.

Musk, now heading rival firm xAI, is currently suing OpenAI over claims the company abandoned its original nonprofit mission.

OpenAI, in turn, is suing Musk, accusing him of interfering with its business.

The fact that OpenAI has now hired away senior talent from both Tesla and xAI could add fuel to an already testy legal and ideological battle.

Why Engineering Talent Is The Real AI Arms Race

With generative AI models improving largely through scale—more data, more compute, more infrastructure—the engineers who can build the platforms behind them have become some of the most valuable people in tech.

The industry’s focus is shifting from just model development to full-stack engineering capable of supporting AI systems that may one day exceed human intelligence.

And, OpenAI is willing to go head-to-head with rivals—on pay, compute, and mission—to secure that future.