Anthropic just poached Google's global data center design chief, and he's not the first senior infrastructure hire to make that jump.
John M. Wilson spent six years running global design and construction at Google, with responsibilities covering data center development and subsea infrastructure programs. Before that he led Amazon's European design and construction work, and earlier in his career he served as a chief of staff in the British Army and an infrastructure director at NATO. He's joining Anthropic as a technical staff member overseeing capacity delivery across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Wilson is at least the 11th Google infrastructure veteran to land at Anthropic, following people like Winnie Leung, who now leads data center infrastructure, Liwen Mao, who runs data center design, electrical lead Adam Johnson and security engineer Peter Sarossy.
Anthropic isn't just hiring engineers here, it's hiring an entire org chart. Construction, electrical systems, security, operations, energy and compute finance all now have former Google staff in charge. That's the kind of hiring pattern you see when a company expects to be pouring concrete and laying subsea cable for years, not quarters.
Google, meanwhile, has a retention problem on its hands. Losing this many specialists to one rival in under a year isn't bad luck, it's a pattern.