OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology leader Uday Ruddaraju as its Chief Technology Officer of Compute, nearly a year after he joined the company from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI.
Ruddaraju previously served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at xAI before moving to OpenAI.
Announcing his new role, Ruddaraju described his first year at OpenAI as highly rewarding and praised the company’s Compute team for rapidly and reliably expanding infrastructure.
“My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems work across compute, network, storage and machine learning needed to train frontier models like GPT-5.6,” he said.
He noted that the challenges would become more complex as OpenAI continued to scale, requiring innovation across every layer of the technology stack.
Ruddaraju said the company’s goal was to build the world’s largest computing footprint so that advanced artificial intelligence could reach more people and become part of every workflow.
He added that OpenAI had an ambitious compute expansion plan involving large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data-centre construction across civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.
Ruddaraju’s career journey has attracted attention because he completed his undergraduate studies at a Hyderabad college rather than at one of India’s IITs or NITs.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad. During college, he secured an internship at Amazon Web Services.
He later moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Ruddaraju worked at eBay between 2013 and 2018 before joining Robinhood. He later moved to xAI, where he played an important role in building the company’s AI infrastructure.
His departure from xAI also made headlines, as he was reportedly among the most prominent executives recruited by OpenAI from Elon Musk’s company.
In his farewell message, Ruddaraju thanked Musk and the xAI team for giving him the opportunity to help build Colossus, the company’s massive AI computing system.
He described the experience as a rare opportunity to contribute to a foundational project and said working directly with Musk had been one of the most valuable aspects of his time at xAI.
Ruddaraju also praised the execution capabilities of Musk and his teams, adding that he was grateful to have played a role in shaping the future of AI computing.