OpenAI elevates Uday Ruddarraju to CTO of Compute
Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Uday Ruddarraju reflected on his first year at the company and the engineering effort behind OpenAI’s latest models.
OpenAI has promoted Uday Ruddarraju to the role of chief technology officer for Compute as access to large-scale computing infrastructure has become one of the defining competitive factors in AI.
The appointment comes as AI companies race to secure the processing power, networking and data-centre capacity needed to build increasingly capable foundation models.
Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Ruddarraju reflected on his first year at the company and the engineering effort behind OpenAI’s latest models.
“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 wrote.
Ruddarraju joined OpenAI around a year ago as Head of Compute and Infrastructure after leading infrastructure engineering at xAI. Before that, he held engineering leadership roles at Robinhood and eBay, building large-scale cloud and platform systems.
His new role highlights a broader shift across the AI industry. While new models often attract the attention, companies are investing heavily in the underlying infrastructure needed to train and deploy them.
Ruddarraju, outlining the scale of OpenAI’s ambitions said, “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. There is a lot to build across large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data-centre builds.”
The announcement comes as major AI developers continue expanding their infrastructure footprints. OpenAI has been increasing investment in computing capacity to support newer generations of models, while rivals including xAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta are also investing billions of dollars in advanced chips and data centres to meet rapidly growing demand for AI services.
Governments in several countries are simultaneously introducing policies and funding initiatives aimed at strengthening domestic AI infrastructure and semiconductor supply chains, recognising compute as a strategic national capability.