OpenAI names former xAI executive Uday Ruddarraju as CTO of Compute

OpenAI has appointed Uday Ruddarraju to lead its infrastructure and compute businesses. He is the engineer who helped build one of the largest GPU clusters assembled by a rival lab.

From Colossus to compute chief

Ruddarraju’s new title is Chief Technology Officer of Compute, a role he took in July 2026. That came one year after he joined OpenAI in July 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure.

Before OpenAI, Ruddarraju led infrastructure engineering at xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company. There, he worked on the Colossus supercomputer, a cluster that exceeded 250,000 GPUs and supported major AI training runs.

His new remit at OpenAI is broad. It covers data centers, GPU clusters and hardware manufacturing, folded into a single compute framework. The stated aim is to build “the world’s largest compute footprint” to widen access to frontier AI.

A resume built on scaling things

Ruddarraju’s background runs well beyond AI labs. He spent nearly six years at Robinhood, rising to Senior Director of Engineering and Head of Infrastructure.

Before that, he logged more than five years at eBay. His career started with an internship at Amazon Web Services.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad. He also earned a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota.

During his first year at OpenAI, the compute team expanded capacity quickly to support models such as GPT-5.6.

Why the compute job matters now

Ruddarraju’s hiring also carries a competitive subplot. OpenAI and xAI are direct rivals, and OpenAI now has someone who helped build xAI’s flagship supercomputer running its own compute operations.

What this means

The clearest signal from this appointment is that OpenAI is treating compute as a core business, not a back-office function. Giving it a dedicated CTO puts infrastructure on par with the company’s other technical leadership.

Bundling data centers, GPU clusters and hardware manufacturing under one leader points to a vertically integrated approach. Rather than treating each piece as a separate procurement problem, OpenAI appears to want a unified system it can plan and scale as a whole.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.