OpenAI Appoints Indian-Origin Tech Leader Uday Ruddaraju as CTO, Compute

OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Compute, reinforcing the company’s leadership as it rapidly scales the infrastructure behind its next generation of frontier AI models.

Ruddaraju joined OpenAI in July 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure after serving as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI. Over the past year, he has led the expansion of OpenAI’s compute capacity, helping build the large-scale networking, storage, and machine learning systems required to train increasingly advanced AI models, including GPT-5.6.

Before joining OpenAI, Ruddaraju held senior engineering leadership positions at xAI, Robinhood, and eBay, building deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and large-scale computing platforms. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad before pursuing higher studies in the United States.

Announcing his promotion on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju said OpenAI’s Compute team is working to build the “world’s largest compute footprint” to make frontier AI accessible across more users and workflows. He highlighted the company’s roadmap spanning large-scale distributed systems, hardware, networking, manufacturing, and data centre engineering while noting that OpenAI continues to hire talent across the technology stack.

His appointment comes as access to high-performance computing infrastructure has become one of the most critical competitive factors in artificial intelligence. As CTO, Compute, Ruddaraju will play a central role in shaping the technology backbone that powers OpenAI’s future AI models and global infrastructure expansion.