OpenAI names Indian-origin executive Uday Ruddaraju CTO of Compute

OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, a year after he joined the artificial intelligence company from Elon Musk's xAI. The promotion places him at the helm of the computing infrastructure supporting OpenAI's frontier AI models.

Announcing the appointment on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju described his first year at OpenAI as "an incredibly rewarding experience", highlighting the rapid expansion of the company's compute capabilities to support increasingly advanced AI systems.

Leading the infrastructure behind frontier AI

According to Ruddaraju, OpenAI's compute team has spent the past year significantly expanding the infrastructure required to develop large-scale AI models.

He said the team has focused on:

• Bringing substantial new computing capacity online.
• Building networking, storage and machine learning systems.
• Supporting the infrastructure behind frontier AI models, including GPT-5.6.

In his LinkedIn post, Ruddaraju said OpenAI is working to build what he described as "the world's largest compute footprint" so frontier AI can support more users and workflows.

He also said the company has an extensive roadmap covering large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data centre construction across civil, mechanical and electrical engineering disciplines, adding that OpenAI is hiring talent across the technology stack.

Journey from Hyderabad to Silicon Valley

Ruddaraju began his academic journey at Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) in Hyderabad, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. While still a student, he secured an internship at Amazon Web Services before moving to the United States to pursue a Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

His career spans several major technology companies.

Before joining OpenAI, he held leadership and engineering roles at:

• eBay between 2013 and 2018.
• Robinhood.
• xAI, where he served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering.

From xAI's Colossus to OpenAI's compute platform

During his time at xAI, Ruddaraju led the engineering team responsible for building Colossus, the company's AI supercomputer powered by more than 250,000 GPUs.

When he joined OpenAI in July 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure, the move attracted industry attention as one of the company's most prominent hires from Musk's AI venture.

Following his departure from xAI, Ruddaraju thanked Musk and his colleagues in a LinkedIn post, describing the opportunity to help build Colossus as one of the most valuable learning experiences of his career.

Supporting OpenAI's next phase of AI development

As CTO of Compute, Ruddaraju will oversee the computing systems underpinning OpenAI's future AI models, an increasingly critical function as demand for computing power continues to grow across the artificial intelligence industry.

His promotion reflects OpenAI's continued investment in expanding the infrastructure required to train and deploy increasingly sophisticated AI models. It also highlights the growing importance of compute leadership as companies race to scale data centres, specialised hardware and distributed computing systems to meet rising AI workloads.