OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, marking a major leadership milestone at one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies. The promotion comes nearly a year after Ruddaraju joined OpenAI from Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI, where he served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering.
Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju described his first year at OpenAI as ‘incredibly rewarding’ and said he was excited to lead the company’s compute division as it expands the infrastructure powering next-generation AI models.
As CTO of Compute, Ruddaraju will oversee the systems that provide the massive computing power required to train and deploy OpenAI’s frontier AI models. He said the compute team has worked to rapidly expand capacity while strengthening the underlying compute, networking, storage and machine learning systems needed to support advanced models, including GPT-5.6.
He also highlighted the organisation’s ambitious roadmap to significantly scale its computing infrastructure, noting that the company is hiring talent in distributed systems, hardware engineering, manufacturing, and large-scale data center development to support future AI growth.
Ruddaraju’s journey started in Hyderabad, where he got his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT). During his undergrad, he landed 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.
In the meantime, he built his professional path across companies like eBay and Robinhood before eventually joining xAI. In 2025, he moved to OpenAI as the race for top AI talent intensified. At OpenAI, he rose from Head of Compute and Infrastructure to now the CTO of Compute.
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Ruddaraju’s elevation mirrors the company’s push to strengthen the computing backbone needed for increasingly powerful AI systems.
Ruddaraju’s appointment highlights how much Indian-origin technology leaders are influencing what comes next in artificial intelligence.