Indian-Origin Tech Executive Uday Ruddaraju Named OpenAI's CTO Of Compute

OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin tech executive Uday Ruddaraju to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, just a year after he joined the company from Elon Musk's xAI. Announcing the news on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju reflected on his first year at OpenAI, calling it an incredibly rewarding experience. He said his team had focused on rapidly expanding the computing infrastructure needed to train increasingly advanced AI models.

According to Ruddaraju, the compute team spent the past year bringing massive new computing capacity online while building systems for networking, storage, and machine learning that power frontier AI models, including GPT-5.6.

"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," he wrote on LinkedIn. 

See the post here:

From Hyderabad to Silicon Valley

Ruddaraju earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) in Hyderabad before securing an internship at Amazon Web Services while still in college. He later moved to the United States to pursue a Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

His career spans several leading technology companies. After working at eBay from 2013 to 2018, he joined Robinhood before moving to xAI, where he served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering.

At xAI, Ruddaraju 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, his move was widely reported as one of OpenAI's most significant hires from Elon Musk's AI company.

Following his departure, Ruddaraju said that working directly with Musk had been one of the most valuable learning experiences of his career. "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.

After an unforgettable ride, I've decided to move on from @xai and yesterday was my last day.

When I first joined, I thought everyone was absolutely nuts for thinking we could deploy 100K GPUs in 4 months, especially without a fully functioning site. Watching us go and double…

— Uday Ruddarraju (@udayruddarraju) July 8, 2025

Now, after just one year at OpenAI, he has been promoted to CTO of Compute, where he will oversee the computing infrastructure that underpins the company's next generation of AI models.