OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin tech leader Uday Ruddarraju to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute – about a year after he joined the company from Elon Musk’s xAI.
“I’m excited to share that I’m stepping into the CTO, Compute role at OpenAI,” Ruddarraju announced in a LinkedIn post.
Reflecting on his first year at OpenAI, the techie added, “My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT‑5.6.”
Looking ahead, he said OpenAI is focused on significantly expanding its AI infrastructure. “We’re on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow,” he wrote.
“We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up. There is a lot to build across large scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. We’re hiring exceptional people across the stack,” he added.
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Who is Uday Ruddarraju?
According to his LinkedIn profile, Ruddarraju studied Computer Science at Hyderabad’s Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology.
While still in college, he secured an internship at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He later moved to the US to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.
Over the years, Ruddarraju has held engineering leadership roles at eBay and Robinhood before joining Elon Musk’s xAI as Head of Infrastructure Engineering.
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Ruddarraju’s exit from xAI
Ruddarraju moved to OpenAI in 2025. His departure from xAI attracted attention as he was among the senior infrastructure leaders who left Elon Musk’s AI company for OpenAI.
In his farewell message to xAI, he thanked Musk and the team for the opportunity to help build the company’s AI infrastructure.
“Thank you @elonmusk and everyone at xAI for the rare opportunity to help build something truly foundational with Colossus. It was a privilege to be part of a mission this bold, and to see from the inside what relentless focus and execution really look like,” he wrote.
“Reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI,” he added.
He also praised Musk’s execution, writing, “Jensen Huang was right, Elon and his teams are singular in what they can achieve. Grateful to have played a small part in shaping the future of AI Compute from the inside.”
