AWS’ Data Center Network Lead Jumps To xAI To Run ML Infrastructure

‘After 9 years leading datacenter network strategy at AWS, I have decided to take on a new challenge,’ says Saurabh Kumar, announcing his new xAI infrastructure job on LinkedIn.

Saurabh Kumar, Amazon Web Services’ principal engineer for its data center networking strategy, has left the $132 billion cloud giant to run machine learning (ML) infrastructure for Elon Musk’s startup xAI.

“After 9 years leading datacenter network strategy at AWS, I have decided to take on a new challenge,” said Kumar recently in a LinkedIn post that’s garnered over 120 comments.

“It was a privilege to work alongside the exceptional talent at AWS and shepherd its transformation from a consumer of network technology to an industry-leader, driving bleeding-edge products across multiple networking domains,” said Kumar, the now former principal engineer for AWS’ data center network engineering business.

[Related: AWS Infrastructure Targeted By Russian Cyberattacks In ‘Yearslong’ Campaign]

Kumar joined Palo Alto, Calif.-based xAI last month.

He said his responsibilities at xAI will include “building teams, processes and interconnect products from GPUs to Backbone” for the company’s ML infrastructure business.

xAI is the owner of the popular Grok AI chatbot, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company has been investing millions in infrastructure over the past two years, currently operating two data centers in the U.S.

“I look forward to delivering the network infrastructure for massive-scale compute gigafactories powering the innovative products at xAI,” Kumar said, referring to xAI’s data centers.

AWS, for its part, has been investing billions of dollars each year into building dozens of new data centers across the globe to expand its infrastructure and customer reach.

Musk Says xAI Will Build New Data Center

Last month, xAI CEO Elon Musk unveiled that his AI startup had purchased a third building to expand its data center infrastructure, aiming to boost training capacity to nearly 2 gigawatts of compute power.

“xAI has bought a third building called Macrohard,” Musk recently wrote on his social media platform X, formally known as Twitter.

Musk later said xAI is working on creating a new AI software company dubbed Macrohard.

Additionally, last week xAI introduced Grok Business and Grok Enterprise for organizations, with Grok Business starting at $30 per seat per month, while Grok Enterprise will feature custom pricing.

Kumar’s IT Career

Saurabh Kumar began his IT career at optical networking solutions and semiconductor company Infinera, where he stayed for nearly a decade in top engineering and development roles. Infinera was acquired in 2025 by Nokia for $2.3 billion.

He joined Google for about one year charged with network strategy and architecture for Google Fiber.

Kumar left Google in 2017 for AWS to become a principal engineer for AWS’ Data Center Network Engineering unit.

He could not be reached for comment by press time.

“After a decade of speeds-and-feeds, we find ourselves at a critical juncture for datacenter networks— emerging modalities like CPC, NPO, CPO, THz radio; technologies like ring resonators and TFLN, OCS-based reconfigurability, and the mandate to identify and champion the most power-efficient approaches to stay in lock-step with GPU cadence while accelerating buildouts and improving build quality,” Kumar said on LinkedIn last week.

AWS generated $33 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2025, meaning the cloud giant currently has a $132 billion annual run rate.