Venkat Thummisi is a veteran of digital infrastructure with a career spanning more than two decades at the intersection of datacenters, high-performance computing, and AI systems. Over the last four years at OpenAI, he led the core infrastructure that enabled the training and deployment of frontier AI models. His work involved designing GPU-dense clusters optimized for low-latency interconnects, fine-tuned power and cooling topologies for hyperscale efficiency, and next-generation storage architectures to sustain the massive throughput requirements of large language models.

Venkat’s contributions at OpenAI directly advanced the ability to train multi-trillion-parameter models with reliability, speed, and cost efficiency at global scale. Prior to OpenAI, Venkat spent more than 20 years at EMC (now Dell Technologies), where he built over a dozen enterprise-grade datacenters totaling more than 2.5 GW of capacity across North America, Europe, and Asia. He pioneered architectures that combined replication, mirroring, and high-availability frameworks to guarantee business continuity for mission-critical workloads in banking, telecom, and healthcare. His designs consistently pushed the boundaries of redundancy and fault tolerance, setting benchmarks for Tier III and Tier IV resilience while also driving advancements in energy efficiency and modular datacenter deployments.  

Extending his expertise into healthcare, Venkat led the design of secure, cloud-based infrastructure for Trizetto (later acquired by Cognizant). He built HIPAA-compliant environments capable of supporting millions of transactions per day across payer platforms, integrating advanced encryption, zero-trust network segmentation, and elastic compute layers to meet both regulatory and performance demands.