OpenAI hires Meta’s Sandhya Devanathan to lead Southeast Asia and Australia

OpenAI has hired Meta’s Sandhya Devanathan to lead Southeast Asia and Australia from October, covering consumer growth, enterprise adoption and regulatory engagement across markets of more than 600 million people. Its European expansion has centred on Dublin and Brussels.

OpenAI has hired a Meta executive to run Southeast Asia and Australia. Sandhya Devanathan starts in October in a newly created role covering markets that hold more than 600 million people.

The brief is broad and commercial. She takes consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, operations and engagement with regulators, working from Singapore.

She is the third senior regional appointment in six months. Kiran Mani became managing director for Asia-Pacific in March, and Prabhjeet Singh arrived from Uber in June to run India.

The user map explains the hurry. Indonesia and the Philippines are two of OpenAI’s top ten markets globally by ChatGPT users, according to the company.

No European country appears in that sentence. OpenAI has not named one.

Europe has had investment of a different character. It opened Paris and Brussels alongside London and Dublin, the last of those chosen for proximity to the people writing the rules.

The Irish operation is the larger commitment. OpenAI is tripling Dublin from just over 100 staff towards 350, taking 88,000 square feet in Silicon Docks for engineering and support roles.

The reasons given for Dublin are telling. Market access, an English-speaking workforce and a settled corporate tax position, which is how you describe a headquarters rather than a growth market.

The shape is worth naming. Asia is getting country managers with revenue to find, while Europe is getting a legal entity and a policy shop pointed at an enforcement unit of 36 people.

OpenAI is not alone in reading it that way. Anthropic opened its own Paris and Munich offices this year, and its European hiring has followed a similar logic.

None of which is a complaint about Europe being neglected. It is closer to the anxiety TNW described when the industry gathered in France, where the worry was never absence but dependence.

So the interesting question is not where OpenAI opens offices. It is what a company builds in a place, and Europe keeps being chosen for the paperwork.