OpenAl has promoted Indian American tech leader Uday Ruddaraju to Chief Technology Officer, Compute, tasking him with building the world’s largest compute infrastructure for frontier Al models like GPT-5.6.
This strategic promotion underscores OpenAl’s substantial commitment to Al infrastructure development amid growing competition among major Al firms to secure and build large-scale data centre networks
The strategic promotion of India educated Ruddaraju underscores OpenAl’s substantial commitment to Al infrastructure development amid growing competition among major Al firms to secure and build large-scale data centre networks
He earned a BE in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India before coming to the U.S. and get an MS in Computer Science from University of Minnesota.
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Ruddaraju, who has spearheaded the company’s compute and infrastructure efforts for the past year, announced his promotion on LinkedIn, expressing enthusiasm for the expanded role.
“My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT‑5.6,”.
He highlighted that as OpenAI scales, the complexity of these challenges intensifies, demanding continuous innovation across every layer of the technology stack.
“We’re on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow. We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up,” Ruddaraju wrote. “There is a lot to build across large scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.”
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His team’s focus has been on rapidly deploying capacity and constructing the necessary compute, networking, storage, and machine learning systems essential for training frontier models.
The company aims to make frontier Al accessible to a wider user base and diverse workflows by significantly expanding its compute resources. OpenAl has outlined an extensive roadmap for compute expansion and is actively recruiting talent in areas such as distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data centre engineering.
Before joining OpenAl in July 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure, Ruddaraju held leadership positions at xAI and Xas Head of Infrastructure Engineering from June 2024 to July 2025.
His career also includes nearly six years at Robinhood, where he advanced to Senior Director of Engineering and Head of Infrastructure, and over five years at eBay in various software engineering roles focused on cloud and platforms.