Anthropic builds out energy team as AI compute demands intensify

Anthropic has hired three energy and data center specialists in recent months, signaling a significant internal push to manage the infrastructure demands of large-scale AI development.

Sana Ouji has joined Anthropic as Energy Lead, bringing more than 15 years of experience in energy transactions and data center clean energy strategy

Anthropic has assembled a dedicated energy team to oversee its global data center strategy, drawing talent from Google, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the data center development sector as it scales its AI compute infrastructure.

Sana Ouji joined the company in April 2026 as Energy Lead, bringing more than 15 years of experience in energy transactions and commercial structuring. She spent the previous six-plus years at Google, where she worked across data center clean energy strategy for the East Region, Latin America, and strategic investments and partnerships. She announced the move on LinkedIn, noting she would work alongside Ariel Horowitz and Tim Hughes to develop and deliver a global energy strategy to support the company's data center portfolio.

From grid policy to AI infrastructure

Horowitz joined Anthropic several weeks earlier as the company's first dedicated energy hire. She previously served as Deputy Director for Grid Modernization at the U.S. Department of Energy as a member of the Senior Executive Service, where she led a division of around 40 staff and directed delivery of the $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program.

That program funded investments in smart grid technology, grid modernization, hardening, and transmission expansion nationwide, and under her leadership expanded to include advanced reconductoring, AI-assisted interconnection improvement, and grid-flexible data center development. She also oversaw a $2.5 billion formula grant program for states, territories, and tribes, and led negotiations for $400 million in lease and power purchase agreement terms under the $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund.

Prior to the DOE, Horowitz spent more than five years at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, ultimately as Senior Program Director overseeing clean transportation, net zero grid, and technology development programs. She served as the state's in-house expert on electric distribution system planning and utility decarbonization strategy, and led interagency working groups on deep decarbonization planning. She announced her appointment on LinkedIn, describing the role as a "total dream" and noting she was focused on building out Anthropic's data center supply portfolio and energy posture broadly.

A decade and a half of data center development

Hughes, who leads leasing, land, and energy at Anthropic, joined in February 2026 with a background he describes plainly on LinkedIn: "I've spent about a decade and a half figuring out where to put large buildings full of computers and how to get enough electricity to them."

He previously served as Chief Development Officer at STACK Infrastructure, where he built and ran a large development team and oversaw more than 200MW of critical capacity across hyperscaler build-to-suit projects, with capital deployment cycles exceeding $1 billion over five-plus year horizons.

Before STACK, he ran his own project consulting firm focused on data center and network acquisition and development. His earlier career included more than eight years at Facebook, spanning site operations, technical program management — including managing the deployment of Facebook's first long-haul dark fiber network connecting its Luleå, Sweden data center — and site selection, where he led new data center expansion projects totaling over 250MW across greenfield markets in the US and EMEA.

On Anthropic's demands versus his previous roles, Hughes is direct: "same thing for AI compute, things are denser, and need more power; faster."

Scale, speed, and grid strategy

Ouji's hire rounds out a team that now spans clean energy procurement, federal grid policy, and large-scale data center development. She brings origination and commercial structuring experience from Lightsource BP and NRG Energy, in addition to her Google tenure, and has executed complex transactions across data center infrastructure and energy technologies.

The formation of a named, dedicated energy team points to Anthropic treating power access and grid strategy as a core operational function. As AI model training and inference workloads place increasing pressure on energy supply chains and interconnection timelines, the depth of experience this team brings, from federal program delivery to hyperscale buildout, suggests the company is positioning itself to move quickly on infrastructure at a moment when grid capacity has become one of the primary constraints on AI development.