San Francisco, OpenAI has elevated Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddarraju as Chief Technology Officer, Compute, expanding his leadership responsibilities as the artificial intelligence company scales the infrastructure supporting its frontier models.
Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure after serving as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Elon Musk-led xAI and X. Over the past year, he has worked with OpenAI’s Compute team on bringing additional computing capacity online and developing the compute, networking, storage and machine-learning systems required to train advanced AI models.
“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,” Ruddarraju said in a LinkedIn post announcing his elevation.
“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 added.
In his new role, Ruddarraju will help lead OpenAI’s effort to expand its global computing footprint. His responsibilities will include addressing infrastructure challenges across multiple layers of the technology stack as the company increases the scale and complexity of its AI training and deployment operations.
Before joining OpenAI, Ruddarraju served at xAI and X between June 2024 and July 2025, where he led infrastructure engineering. He was reportedly involved in developing the computing infrastructure used to train xAI’s Grok models.
Earlier, he spent nearly six years at Robinhood in engineering leadership positions. He also worked at eBay for more than five years in progressively senior technology roles and began his career with Amazon Web Services. Ruddarraju completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad and later studied at the University of Minnesota.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and deployment company headquartered in San Francisco. Its products include ChatGPT and a portfolio of generative AI models and developer tools. The company is expanding its computing, networking and data-centre infrastructure to support the training and deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.
