OpenAI is recruiting a power-trading lead to hedge the electricity its data centers burn, per a posting on its careers page. The job wants a decade or more in power trading, utility strategy, or commodity risk management, plus a working grasp of US power and natural gas markets, and the hire starts out with nobody reporting to them. OpenAI describes the work as turning big, shifting exposures on electricity and fuel into procurement and hedging that protects the economics of its infrastructure. Gas is in there because it generates more than 40% of US electricity, and data center developers keep building their own off-grid gas plants rather than wait out grid connection queues. Meta got into power trading last year and is now hiring an energy manager to develop onsite generation.
