OpenAI plans Israeli hub to capture enterprise AI spend

OpenAI is setting up a business development centre in Israel and has hired a senior Israeli executive from Amazon to lead the effort. The ChatGPT maker is currently recruiting an account manager for Israeli high-tech clients—a role listed under Paris on its careers site but intended for Israel-based staff. A country manager role is expected to follow depending on initial commercial traction.

Later this month, the company will host a startup-focused event in Israel alongside AWS to pitch its enterprise products directly to founders. The expansion is driven by hard usage metrics rather than pure geographic diversification. According to data from Anthropic, Israel ranks first globally in per capita use of Claude among the working population, outpacing both the US and Singapore.

OpenAI intends to translate that deep corporate adoption into direct revenue by embedding itself within the local startup ecosystem early. This mirrors the customer-acquisition strategies historically used by cloud infrastructure providers, which secure clients when they are small and scale revenues as the companies grow.

This push reflects a direct escalation in the battle for enterprise AI budgets. Anthropic and Google have already moved aggressively to capture corporate AI spending in the Israeli market. By partnering with AWS for its upcoming July event, OpenAI is signaling that capturing these early-stage startup relationships requires tight integration with the cloud platforms where these companies build their infrastructure.

For market observers, the Israeli deployment offers a clear blueprint for OpenAI's broader international commercial strategy. The company is directly replicating the phased approach it took in India, where it began recruiting similar business development roles about a year ago and aims to have an active office operational by the end of 2025. Physical research and development centres, which OpenAI currently operates only in London and Zurich, are deliberately positioned as a later phase of market entry.

Israel's strategic value to AI vendors is further reinforced by its accelerating domestic innovation capacity. Nvidia recently inaugurated an R&D centre in southern Israel, while local firms like AI video generator Artlist and Base44, which recently launched its own large language model, are scaling rapidly. For OpenAI, securing commercial agreements with this next generation of local AI companies represents a high-yield opportunity to capture recurring revenue as these startups mature.