Indian-origin Uday Ruddarraju becomes CTO of OpenAI Compute

OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddarraju to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, a little over a year after he joined the company from Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI. The appointment comes as OpenAI accelerates investments in computing infrastructure to support the training of increasingly larger AI models.

Announcing the promotion on LinkedIn, Ruddarraju said his first year at OpenAI had been "incredibly rewarding." "Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably," he wrote, adding that the team has also carried out "the deep systems across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT 5.6."

As OpenAI scales its infrastructure further, he said the engineering challenges are becoming more complex. "As we scale, the problems only get harder that require pushing the frontiers and innovating across every layer (literally) of the stack," he said.

Ruddarraju also outlined OpenAI's infrastructure ambitions, saying the company is "on a mission to build the world's largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow."

According to him, OpenAI has an "exciting compute ramp and roadmap" ahead, with work spanning "large scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering." He also said the company is hiring across the compute stack.

Previously worked at Elon Musk’s xAI

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure after leaving xAI, where he served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering. Before that, he held engineering leadership roles at X, Robinhood and eBay.

His move to OpenAI came shortly after he exited xAI, where he had spent just over a year helping build the infrastructure behind Colossus, the supercomputer powering the company's AI efforts. Reflecting on his departure in a post on X in July 2025, Ruddarraju wrote, "When I first joined, I thought everyone was absolutely nuts for thinking we could deploy 100K GPUs in four months, especially without a fully functioning site."

"Watching us go and double that, and most importantly successfully train Grok 3 made me incredibly proud... and very happy to be wrong," he said. Thanking Elon Musk and the xAI team, Ruddarraju called the opportunity to build Colossus "truly foundational."

"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, adding that reporting directly to Musk "was definitely the best part about working at xAI."

He also described building Colossus and training Grok 3 as career highlights and said he was "grateful to have played a small part in shaping the future of AI Compute from the inside."