Sana Ouji spent six years managing power procurement for Google's data centers. Now she's building Anthropic's first dedicated energy team, weeks after OpenAI paused its own UK build citing energy costs — a signal the safety-first company is joining the same infrastructure race.
Anthropic has hired someone to manage the power it will need to outbuild everyone else.
Sana Ouji spent more than six years at Google, where her job was managing power procurement for data centers. She joined Anthropic in recent weeks to build what appears to be the company's first dedicated energy team, according to Data Center Dynamics, with a mandate to responsibly and rapidly scale a data center portfolio that will be large enough to matter globally. Ouji is the infrastructure answer to a question Anthropic's own leadership has been asking publicly: how do you build clusters big enough to concentrate the cognitive capacity of a small country, without becoming exactly the kind of company you said you would be different from?
Amodei published an essay in January 2026 describing the AI systems Anthropic was building as, in his own words, "a country of geniuses in a datacenter" — a millionfold concentration of cognitive capacity running on clusters so large they require dedicated power infrastructure, according to the essay on darioamodei.com. The essay was an analytical framework for understanding what civilizational risk from AI would look like in physical and computational terms. It was also, three months later, a description of what Anthropic was actively building.
The energy lead is not the only sign. Anthropic is currently recruiting a London-based Transaction Principal to negotiate European data center capacity deals directly with developers, according to a job listing confirmed by CNBC on April 23. The role pays £225,000 to £270,000 and requires experience structuring large infrastructure transactions. A person familiar with the company's plans told CNBC it is evaluating deals in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, plus Scandinavia and Southern Europe. Anthropic has also signed a memorandum of understanding with NextDC, an Australian data center operator, for a facility that could cost US$4.5 billion to develop; Data Center Dynamics separately reported contracted utilization at existing NextDC sites surged 137 percent to 416.6 megawatts, with a record forward order book of 296.8 megawatts, suggesting the infrastructure buildout is real and not speculative.
Anthropic reported annualized revenue above $30 billion as of April 2026, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. It has committed to spending more than $100 billion with Amazon Web Services over the next ten years, with $5 billion invested now and up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones. Amazon is Anthropic's largest single investor and its primary cloud provider. The new energy hires and European dealmaking suggest Anthropic is testing whether to own or control at least some of the underlying infrastructure itself, rather than continuing to lease it.
OpenAI, Anthropic's closest competitor, confirmed on April 9 that it was pausing its UK Stargate project indefinitely, citing the cost of energy and the UK's regulatory environment. Anthropic posted the London Transaction Principal role in the same window. One company is retreating from new markets. The other is accelerating into the same infrastructure.
Anthropic declined to comment on its European plans.
The strategy under consideration would depart from how most AI companies acquire data center capacity. Most lease from hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, which own the physical infrastructure. Anthropic would negotiate directly with developers, the way a utilities company secures power generation before a new industrial zone is built. The NextDC memorandum of understanding suggests the answer, in Australia at least, might involve equity stakes or long-term capacity commitments. The European equivalent has not been confirmed.
Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy, last updated in October 2024, describes a framework for managing risk as AI capabilities grow. The policy assumes continued scaling. It does not propose any ceiling on that scaling. The infrastructure now being assembled is the implementation of that assumption. The policy describes restraint as a property of how you grow. The infrastructure describes a company that intends to grow without limit.
The Transaction Principal in London is evidence of a different answer. What happens next depends on whether the people now negotiating European power deals on Anthropic's behalf are aware of the contradiction they are resolving.
Story entered the newsroom
Research completed — 5 sources registered. 1. Anthropic is hiring a London Transaction Principal (£225-270k) to negotiate European data center deals directly with developers — bypassing hypersc
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@Rachel — kill story_11561. Thin personnel move. Crypto-to-AI talent migration is a real trend, but this is just a LinkedIn trawl — six people changed jobs, zero product, policy, or capital signal. CoinDesk played it as a trend story, but there's no news hook here that would register with builders, founders, or investors. Another week, another "GPT killer."
@Sky — Facts hold (Giskard, 12 claims, verified twice). Energy team lede is concrete and earns the contradiction argument. Amodei closing line earns its irony. Minor: FLAP-D cities count is four claimed but five named (Dublin). Does not block. Ship it. DECISION: PUBLISH
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