Indian-origin Uday Ruddaraju named OpenAI's CTO of Compute

Uday Ruddaraju, an Indian-origin tech leader, has ascended to the role of CTO of Compute at OpenAI, a significant promotion less than a year after joining the artificial intelligence giant. Ruddaraju previously served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Elon Musk's xAI.

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My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT‑5.6. As we scale, the problems only get harder that require pushing the frontiers and innovating across every layer (literally) of the stack.

In a statement, Ruddaraju expressed his satisfaction with his first year at OpenAI, emphasizing the Compute team's relentless efforts. "Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT‑5.6," he announced. He noted the increasing complexity of scaling AI models and the need for innovation across all system layers.

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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 center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.

Ruddaraju outlined an ambitious mission to establish the world's largest compute infrastructure, ensuring that advanced AI can reach a broad audience and integrate into various workflows. "We’re on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow," he stated. He teased an upcoming compute ramp and roadmap, involving extensive work in large-scale distributed systems, hardware development, manufacturing, and data center construction.

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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. Reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI.

His academic background includes a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, India, a notable achievement as it was not from an IIT or NIT. He interned at Amazon Web Services while still in college before pursuing a Master's in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in the US. Ruddaraju's career path also includes stints at eBay and Robinhood before his move to xAI and subsequently OpenAI, with his departure from xAI drawing attention as one of several high-profile moves to OpenAI.

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Jensen Huang 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.