OpenAI Promotes Indian-Origin Engineer Uday Ruddaraju to CTO of Compute
OpenAI has promoted Uday Ruddaraju, an Indian-origin technology executive, to the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute. The appointment comes just over a year after he joined the company from xAI, the artificial intelligence firm founded by Elon Musk.
Ruddaraju announced the news on LinkedIn, describing his first year at OpenAI as an immensely rewarding experience. In his post, he stated that his team had focused on rapidly expanding the computing infrastructure necessary to train increasingly advanced AI models.
According to Ruddaraju, the compute team spent the past year bringing substantial new computing capacity online and building systems for networking, storage, and machine learning that power frontier AI models, including GPT-5.6.
He wrote: 'We're on a mission to build the world's largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow. 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 centre builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. We're hiring exceptional people across the stack.'
Ruddaraju holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) in Hyderabad. While still in college, he secured an internship at Amazon Web Services. He later moved to the United States to earn a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
His career includes stints at eBay from 2013 to 2018, followed by roles at Robinhood and then xAI, where he served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering. At xAI, he led the team that built Colossus, the company's AI supercomputer powered by more than 250,000 GPUs.
When he left xAI in July 2025 to join OpenAI as Head of Compute and Infrastructure, the move was widely covered as one of OpenAI's significant hires from Musk's company. Reflecting on his time at xAI, Ruddaraju said working directly with Musk was one of the most valuable learning experiences of his career.
In his new role as CTO of Compute, Ruddaraju will oversee the computing infrastructure that supports OpenAI's next generation of AI models.
