Uday Ruddaraju, an Indian-origin technology executive, has been appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Compute at Microsoft-backed OpenAI. According to reports from Moneycontrol, Ruddaraju announced his new role in a LinkedIn post, stating he is 'excited to share that I'm stepping into the CTO, Compute role at OpenAI.' The Hyderabad-born engineer joined the company in July last year after leaving Elon Musk's xAI, where he was among the key employees who moved to the ChatGPT maker amid intense competition for AI talent and resources.
Ruddaraju highlighted the significant work of OpenAI's compute team in rapidly expanding computing capacity while supporting infrastructure needed for advanced AI model training. As reported by Moneycontrol, he stated that the compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing deep systems work across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT-5.6. He emphasized that as the company scales, problems only get harder that require pushing the frontiers and innovating across every layer of the stack. The appointment comes as OpenAI scales the massive compute systems needed to train and run increasingly sophisticated AI models such as ChatGPT.
According to Ruddaraju's LinkedIn post, OpenAI is working on an exciting compute ramp and roadmap with significant expansion plans. As reported by Moneycontrol, he mentioned there is a lot to build across large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data centre builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. The company is actively hiring exceptional people across the stack to support this ambitious computing infrastructure expansion. Ruddarraju shared that the company is 'on a mission to build the world's largest compute footprint,' adding that OpenAI has an ambitious infrastructure roadmap ahead.
Ruddaraju began his career with an internship at Amazon Web Services while studying engineering before moving to the United States to pursue a Master's in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. According to Moneycontrol, between 2013 and 2018, he worked at eBay, followed by a stint at Robinhood. He later joined Elon Musk's xAI before moving to OpenAI in July last year, where he has now been elevated to the role of CTO, Compute. Originally from Hyderabad, Ruddarraju has spent more than a decade building large-scale technology infrastructure across some of Silicon Valley's leading companies. He was working as the Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Elon Musk's xAI before joining OpenAI in 2025, where he was heading the team that built Colossus, xAI's supercomputer, powered by 2.5 lakh GPUs.
