OpenAI moves into Israel with first local hires
The ChatGPT maker is building its first commercial operation in Israel as competition for enterprise AI customers accelerates.
It took several years, but OpenAI is preparing to establish a presence in Israel, Calcalist has learned. In its first phase, the company is not planning to open a development center. Instead, it is launching a business development operation aimed at building commercial relationships with Israel's high-tech sector.
According to information obtained by Calcalist, a senior Israeli executive who until recently led AWS for Startups in Israel has joined OpenAI and recently began his new role. Officially responsible for the EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), he will report to the company's London office but is expected to focus primarily on Israel.
The company behind ChatGPT wants to build a presence in Israel similar to that of the major cloud providers, which engage with startups from their earliest stages and grow alongside them as they scale into larger enterprises.
Later this month, OpenAI is expected to hold an event for Israeli startups together with AWS, where it will present its enterprise AI offerings. At the same time, OpenAI is recruiting for an Account Director focused on Israel's technology sector. Although the role is officially listed as being based in Paris, it is expected to be filled by an executive working from Israel and reporting into the company's European operations.
Depending on how the Israeli operation develops, people familiar with the company's plans say OpenAI is expected to recruit a senior executive to lead its local activities as country manager.
OpenAI's international expansion strategy suggests this is only the first step. Outside the United States, the company has typically begun with sales and business development teams before later expanding into engineering. India followed a similar pattern, with commercial hiring preceding the establishment of a local office.
While this falls short of the type of large engineering center operated in Israel by companies such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia, it represents an important foothold. Google's own Israeli presence initially focused on business activities before expanding into research and development. More broadly, many multinational development centers in Israel have been built through acquisitions of local companies, as Nvidia did with Mellanox.
Today, OpenAI operates only two engineering hubs outside the United States: London, its largest international development center, and Zurich, which has become an important AI hub thanks to its strong academic ecosystem.
OpenAI's decision to establish a commercial presence in Israel underscores the strategic importance it assigns to the country's technology sector. Although Israel has not produced its own frontier large language model, it has become one of the world's fastest adopters of generative AI, particularly among technology companies.
Recent data published by Anthropic showed Israel ranking first globally in per-capita usage of Claude among the working population, ahead of countries including the United States and Singapore. The findings highlighted both the depth of AI adoption in Israel and the speed with which local companies integrate new technologies.
Last week, Calcalist also reported on a Bank of America study comparing countries across multiple AI indicators. While Israel ranked outside the top tier overall, held back primarily by relatively weak national infrastructure and limited government investment, it ranked much higher on private-sector metrics. According to LinkedIn data cited in the report, Israel ranks first globally in AI talent concentration and third worldwide in AI investment between 2013 and 2025, attracting approximately $19 billion.
Hundreds of Israeli startups are already building products around large language models, making the country an attractive market for AI providers. However, OpenAI faces strong competition. Amazon Web Services has a dominant cloud presence among Israeli startups, while Google's Gemini benefits from the company's extensive local operations.
Winning startup customers early could prove highly lucrative. As companies scale, their spending on AI models can grow substantially, much as cloud computing spending has over the past decade. A stronger presence in Israel could also provide OpenAI with broader enterprise adoption and additional feedback to improve its models.
OpenAI is also under growing competitive pressure from Anthropic. While ChatGPT remains the best-known consumer AI product, Anthropic has focused more aggressively on enterprise customers and international expansion, opening operations in markets including Germany, Japan and South Korea.
The result is an increasingly intense battle for corporate AI customers in markets such as Israel, where companies are among the world's fastest adopters of generative AI technologies.
