OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju to the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, just a year after he joined the company from Elon Musk's artificial intelligence firm xAI. Announcing the promotion on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju described his first year at OpenAI as an incredibly rewarding experience and highlighted the team's work in rapidly expanding the computing infrastructure required to train increasingly advanced artificial intelligence models. His appointment comes as OpenAI continues to scale its infrastructure to support the next generation of AI systems.

Reflecting on the milestone, Ruddaraju said the compute team spent the past year bringing massive computing capacity online while developing networking, storage and machine learning systems that power frontier AI models, including GPT-5.6. He added that OpenAI aims to build one of the world's largest computing infrastructures so advanced AI can reach more users and industries. He also noted that the company is continuing to recruit talent across large-scale distributed systems, hardware engineering, manufacturing and data centre development.

Originally from Hyderabad, Ruddaraju completed his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) before securing an internship with Amazon Web Services during his college years. He later moved to the United States to pursue a Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, laying the foundation for a career in large-scale computing infrastructure and cloud technologies.

Also Read: NASA's Anil Menon to Launch on First ISS Mission July 14

Over the years, Ruddaraju has held key engineering positions at several leading technology companies. He worked at eBay between 2013 and 2018 before joining Robinhood, where he contributed to infrastructure development. He later moved to xAI as Head of Infrastructure Engineering, where he led the team responsible for building Colossus, the company's AI supercomputer powered by more than 250,000 graphics processing units (GPUs).

Ruddaraju's move from xAI to OpenAI in July 2025 attracted significant attention within the technology industry, with many viewing it as one of OpenAI's most important hires from Elon Musk's AI venture. Following his departure from xAI, he publicly thanked Musk and his former colleagues, describing the opportunity to help build Colossus as one of the most valuable learning experiences of his professional career. He praised the organisation's ambitious vision and its strong emphasis on execution and innovation.

His promotion to CTO of Compute reflects OpenAI's growing focus on strengthening the infrastructure that powers cutting-edge artificial intelligence models. As demand for increasingly capable AI systems continues to rise, large-scale computing resources have become a critical component of AI development. With extensive experience in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems and AI supercomputing, Ruddaraju is expected to play a key role in expanding OpenAI's computing capabilities and supporting the company's future technological advancements.

Also Read: Telangana Proposes Large-Scale Data Centre And AI Infrastructure Campus