
OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin tech executive Uday Ruddaraju to the post of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute. Before OpenAI, he was associated with Elon Musk’s xAI company. Giving information about this news on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju told about his first year in OpenAI and described it as a very good experience. He said his team has focused on rapidly scaling up the computing infrastructure needed to train increasingly advanced AI models. Now, after just one year at OpenAI, he has been promoted to CTO of Compute, where he will oversee the computing infrastructure that supports the company’s next generation AI models.
According to Ruddaraju, the compute team spent the last year bringing huge new computing capacity online, as well as building systems for networking, storage, and machine learning that power frontier AI models, including GPT-5.6.
He wrote on LinkedIn, “We are on a mission to create the world’s largest compute footprint so that AI can reach everyone and every workflow.” We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming. There is much to be gained in civil, mechanical and electrical engineering in large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data center build. We’re hiring the best people at Stack.
From Hyderabad to OpenAI
Ruddaraju earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology (CBIT) in Hyderabad and interned at Amazon Web Services while still in college. After this he went to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Many big technology companies are involved in his career. After working at eBay from 2013 to 2018, he joined Robinhood and then elon musk Moved to xAI company, where he worked as the 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 described as one of OpenAI’s biggest hires from Elon Musk’s AI company.
Ruddaraju said that working directly with Musk was one of the most valuable learning experiences of his career. He wrote: “Thank you to ElonMusk and everyone at xAI for this special opportunity to help build something really basic with Colossus.” It was a great pleasure for me to be a part of such a large mission and to see from the inside what sustained focus and execution actually looks like.
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