Indian-Origin Uday Ruddaraju Appointed OpenAI CTO, Compute

Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju has been appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Compute at Microsoft-backed OpenAI, nearly a year after joining the company following his departure from Elon Musk's xAI. Ruddaraju announced the appointment on LinkedIn, calling his first year at OpenAI "incredibly rewarding."

A Computer Science graduate from Hyderabad's Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), Ruddaraju joined OpenAI in July last year after being among several key xAI employees who moved to the company amid intensifying competition for AI talent.

As CTO, Compute, Ruddaraju will lead the development of the large-scale computing infrastructure that powers OpenAI's frontier AI models. The role includes overseeing distributed computing systems, networking, storage, hardware optimisation and data centre infrastructure, all of which are essential for training increasingly advanced AI systems.

In his post, Ruddaraju said OpenAI's Compute team had rapidly expanded computing capacity while building the systems required to train frontier models such as GPT-5.6. He added that as AI capabilities grow, the engineering challenges become more complex, requiring innovation across every layer of the computing stack.

Ruddaraju said OpenAI aims to build "the world's largest compute footprint" to make frontier AI accessible across industries and workflows. He also revealed that the company is expanding work in large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data centre construction, while hiring talent across these areas.

His appointment comes as global AI companies compete aggressively for both specialised AI talent and high-performance computing infrastructure. Access to advanced processors, cloud platforms and large-scale data centres has become critical for developing next-generation AI models, making compute capacity a key strategic advantage in the AI race.

Before joining OpenAI, Ruddaraju interned at Amazon Web Services, earned a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, and held engineering roles at eBay, Robinhood and xAI before taking on his new leadership position.