OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddarraju to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, a little over a year after he joined the company from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI. The appointment comes as OpenAI accelerates investments in computing infrastructure to support the training of increasingly larger AI models.
Announcing the promotion on LinkedIn, Ruddarraju said his first year at OpenAI had been “incredibly rewarding.” “Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably,” he wrote, adding that the team has also carried out “the deep systems across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT 5.6.”
As OpenAI scales its infrastructure further, he said the engineering challenges are becoming more complex. “As we scale, the problems only get harder that require pushing the frontiers and innovating across every layer (literally) of the stack,” he said.
Ruddarraju also outlined OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions, saying the company is “on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow.”
According to him, OpenAI has an “exciting compute ramp and roadmap” ahead, with work spanning “large scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.” He also said the company is hiring across the compute stack.