Generative AI company OpenAI has continued to expand its semiconductor team, with the hiring of former Google TPU software engineer Safeen Huda.

OpenAI's head of hardware is Richard Ho, with DCD first to report his hiring in November 2023. Ho was one of the leaders of Google's Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPU) project, most recently as senior director of engineering. He also worked at photonic computing company Lightmatter.

Huda, whose move has not been previously reported, worked on hardware-software co-design and modeling of Google's TPUs for the past six and a half years. Prior to his time at Google, he worked at Intel on eFPGAs.

At Google, he was among those cited in Google DeepMind's Gemini 2.5 paper, and is a coinventor for a patent for large-scale accelerator system energy performance optimization.

OpenAI has yet to confirm that it is developing its own chips, but is reported to be working on a custom AI training and inference semiconductor with TSMC and Broadcom.

Broadcom was heavily involved in the development of Google's TPU AI chip.

OpenAI currently has approximately 40 people working in its custom silicon team, with mass production of the chip slated for 2026.

Huda did not respond to requests for comment.