Indian-origin tech executive Uday Ruddaraju takes over as OpenAI's CTO of Compute

Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju has been appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute at Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Ruddaraju joined OpenAI in July last year after leaving Elon Musk's xAI, and announced his new role in a LinkedIn post, describing his first year at the company as "incredibly rewarding."

Ruddaraju began his professional career at eBay, where he worked from 2013 to 2018. He later joined stock trading platform Robinhood before moving to Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI. He was among several prominent xAI engineers who left the company to join OpenAI amid intensifying competition for AI talent.

From An Amazon Internship to being OpenAI, CTO

While pursuing a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science at Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, Ruddaraju interned at Amazon Web Services (AWS). After completing his undergraduate degree, he moved to the United States to pursue a Master's in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.

Announcing his promotion on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju wrote:

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"I'm excited to share that I'm stepping into the CTO, Compute role at OpenAI. My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding."

He was among the key xAI employees who joined rival OpenAI last year as competition for AI talent and computing resources intensified across the industry.

"Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems work across compute, networking, storage and machine learning needed to train frontier models like GPT-5.6. As we scale, the problems only get harder, requiring us to push the frontiers and innovate across every layer—literally—of the stack," he wrote.

Ruddaraju added that OpenAI is working towards building one of the world's largest AI compute footprints to make frontier AI accessible across industries and workflows.

"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 infrastructure spanning civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. We're hiring exceptional people across the stack," he added.

His role at OpenAI

As CTO of Compute, Ruddaraju will oversee the infrastructure that powers OpenAI's frontier AI models.

While announcing his appointment, he said the company's Compute team has been focused on rapidly expanding computing capacity while building the large-scale systems required to train advanced models such as GPT-5.6.

He also highlighted OpenAI's long-term plans to build one of the world's largest AI compute infrastructures, with investments spanning large-scale distributed systems, networking, storage, hardware manufacturing and AI data centre infrastructure.