Indian American computer scientist Sachin Katti is departing his role as OpenAI’s infrastructure lead after roughly a year at the artificial intelligence company “to build something new.”
An Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay graduate, Katti said in a post on LinkedIn Wednesday that “after an incredible year at OpenAI” he “decided to move on to build something new.” He’ll continue to support OpenAI as an advisor after his last day on Nov. 15.
Uday Ruddarraju, another Indian American executive who has been serving as OpenAI’s CTO of compute, will replace Katti and lead the company’s overall compute organization, according to a spokesperson.
“I’m proud of what we’ve built and have total confidence in Uday and the team to carry it forward,” Katti stated.
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Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July of last year, according to his LinkedIn. He previously served as the head of infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI, which was acquired by SpaceX earlier this year.
“The past year has been extraordinary,” Katti wrote noting the company “secured double-digit gigawatts of new compute capacity across Ohio, Portsmouth, Georgia, Trainium and several other projects, working with incredible partners including NVIDIA, Broadcom, AMD, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Cerebras and CoreWeave.”
“We also got GPT-Infra off the ground taking it from an idea to a real business with customers and partners in just three months,” Katti wrote. “Building AI infrastructure at this scale has given me an incredible view into every dimension of the compute world, from silicon and systems to datacenters, energy, supply chains, financing, and the economics of AI.”
Noting that “AI is reshaping the entire computing stack, and I believe we’re still in the early innings,” Katti wrote, “I’m excited to bring everything I’ve learned across these experiences together and go build something new.”
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OpenAI’s compute organization is crucial to its overall strategy; it’s tasked with developing the company’s infrastructure roadmap and ensuring that it can train and serve its models, CNBC noted.
OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, and it’s involved with massive, multi-billion-dollar data center projects in states like Ohio, Texas and Georgia.
Katti is co-founder and former CEO of Uhana (now part of VMware), which built a network AI platform to monitor and optimize mobile networks and applications.
He previously co-founded Kumu Networks, which commercializes breakthrough research from his lab on full duplex radios. Katti received his doctorate in electrical engineering/computer science from MIT in 2009.