OpenAI promoted Uday Ruddarraju to CTO of Compute, placing the former xAI infrastructure leader in charge of scaling systems for frontier artificial intelligence models.
Key Points:
- Ruddarraju became CTO of Compute roughly a year after joining OpenAI from xAI.
- He said the team is expanding compute, networking, storage and machine learning systems used to train GPT-5.6.
- His background spans Amazon Web Services, eBay, Robinhood, xAI’s Colossus project and now OpenAI.
OpenAI Compute Expansion
The Times of India reported Jul. 19 that Ruddarraju received the promotion after his first year at OpenAI, where he previously led compute operations. His new title is CTO of Compute.
Ruddarraju said the team had moved capacity online “quickly and reliably” while handling deeper systems work across compute, networks, storage and machine learning.
He said that work supported training for frontier models including GPT-5.6 and would become more difficult as OpenAI expanded its infrastructure. OpenAI’s goal, he said, is to build “the world’s largest compute footprint,” with planned work covering distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data centers across civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.
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Ruddarraju Career Path
Ruddarraju studied computer science at Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad before earning a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He secured an internship at Amazon Web Services while still an undergraduate.
His later career included work at eBay from 2013 to 2018, followed by roles at Robinhood and xAI, where he led infrastructure engineering.
That sequence placed him close to the physical and software systems behind large AI training clusters, making the appointment central to OpenAI’s expansion plans. In his xAI farewell message, Ruddarraju thanked Elon Musk and said helping build Colossus showed him what focused execution could achieve.
He also cited Jensen Huang. Huang has said Musk and his teams are singular in what they can achieve. The promotion comes about a year after Ruddarraju’s exit from xAI, where his Colossus work made him one of the most prominent infrastructure hires to move between the two AI rivals.
His appointment now shifts that experience toward OpenAI’s effort to expand compute capacity for newer frontier models.
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