By Anirban Sen
NEW YORK, March 18 (Reuters) - Jasjeet Sekhon, a top Bridgewater Associates executive, is joining Google's artificial intelligence unit DeepMind as its chief strategy officer, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis said on Wednesday.
Sekhon, who served as chief scientist and head of AI, will join Bridgewater's board of directors after leaving his current roles there, according to a post by Hassabis on LinkedIn.
Alphabet-owned Google has narrowed the gap with AI market leaders OpenAI and Anthropic,
after initially scrambling to retain the dominance it has long enjoyed in the search industry.
Over the past year, Google's DeepMind unit has launched several new AI offerings, including an upgraded chatbot and AI model known as Gemini, as well as a new AI photo editor, Nano Banana. Google's advances in AI have helped the tech company's shares nearly double in value over the past year.
Sekhon joined Bridgewater in 2018 and played a key role in building its AI research and investment lab called AIA Labs, which is led by the firm's Co-Chief Investment Officer Greg Jensen.
Sekhon, who did not hold any investing responsibilities at Bridgewater, has previously held professorships at several U.S. universities, including Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and most recently, Yale.
Bridgewater, which is led by CEO Nir Bar Dea, posted the highest profit in its 50-year history in 2025, with its flagship fund Pure Alpha delivering a 34% return. It recently named Bob Prince, one of its CIOs and a firm veteran of four decades, as the chair of its board of directors.
The hedge fund firm recently projected that technology companies led by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will collectively invest about $650 billion to scale up AI-related infrastructure this year.
Bridgewater, which managed about $92 billion of assets at the end of September, operates numerous macro funds focused on various areas and regions, including the Pure Alpha fund, the All Weather fund, the Asia Total Return fund, the China Total Return fund, and the AIA Macro fund.
(Reporting by Anirban Sen in New York; Editing by Kenneth Li, Rod Nickel)
