"Elon, His Teams Are...": Indian-Origin Techie Quits xAI To Join OpenAI

The Indian-origin head of infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has resigned to join OpenAI. Uday Ruddarraju, who spent over a year at xAI, was instrumental in building Colossus, a massive supercomputer consisting of more than 200,000 GPUs, and in training Grok 3, one of the company's most advanced AI models.

"Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) 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," he wrote on X on Tuesday, July 8.

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

Uday Ruddarraju expressed gratitude to Elon Musk and the xAI team for the opportunity to contribute to their ambitious infrastructure goals.

"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.

Shortly after leaving xAI, Mr Ruddarraju was named among four high-profile hires at OpenAI. The move was announced by OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman in an internal Slack message and later shared publicly. "Excited to join you, Greg Brockman!" he wrote, reposting the announcement.

Joining Mr Ruddarraju at OpenAI are David Lau, former senior software leader at Tesla; Mike Dalton, who previously worked at xAI and Robinhood; and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta. The new hires bring deep experience in large-scale computing and AI infrastructure.

Both Mr Ruddarraju and Dalton are expected to contribute to Stargate, OpenAI's ambitious infrastructure project aimed at powering the next generation of AI systems. Speaking to Wired, Mr Ruddarraju described Stargate as "a high-stakes infrastructure challenge that aligns well with the kind of ambitious work" he enjoys.