OpenAI has hired another former Tesla and Google employee to help build out its compute infrastructure.

The generative AI company, best known for ChatGPT, has appointed Reza Khiabani as a member of its technical staff. The hire has not previously been reported.

Khiabani spent the last year and ten months at Tesla as a thermal engineer and manager, working with the Dojo team to keep the automotive company's supercomputers cooled.

Before that, Khiabani was at Google for nearly nine years, with most of that spent as an engineering manager, thermal systems architect, and liquid cooling overall tech lead for TPUs.

There, he said, he oversaw machine learning/TPU thermal design, "liquid cooling system development at scale," and data center design.

He joins a growing number of former Tesla and Google employees at the AI startup.

Among them are Google's former TPU lead, who now leads hardware at OpenAI, the creator of Google's Machine Learning Site Reliability Engineering (ML SRE) organization, and Tesla Dojo engineer Clive Chan.

Dojo has seen other departures, and the status of the company's custom chip effort remains uncertain amid layoffs and cutbacks at the company, and a push to embrace Nvidia GPUs.

OpenAI has increased its own data center and semiconductor talent despite using Microsoft's Azure cloud as part of a $13 billion investment that is mostly in cloud credits. The ChatGPT developer has pledged to help inform Microsoft's AI chip development.

But it is also believed to have considered building its own chip hardware, and had evaluated a potential acquisition target. CEO Sam Altman has separately been trying to raise billions for his own chip company.