OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin tech leader Uday Ruddaraju to the role of CTO of Compute, a year after Ruddaraju joined OpenAI after stepping down as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at xAI.“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. As we scale, the problems only get harder that require pushing the frontiers and innovating across every layer (literally) of the stack,” Ruddaraju announced.“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 center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering,” his post read.
Bachelor’s from India
Uday Ruddaraju’s career made headlines as he did his Bachelor’s from India and not from any IIT or NIT. He studied Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. While still in college, he landed an internship at Amazon Web Services. Then he moved to teh US for a Master’s in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.From 2013 to 2018, he worked at eBay, then he joined Robinhood and then xAI. His resignation from xAI again made headlines as he was one of the top 5 poachings from XAI to OpenAI.“Thank you @elonmusk and everyone at xAI for the rare opportunity to help build something truly foundational with Colossus. It was a privilege to be part of a mission this bold, and to see from the inside what relentless focus and execution really look like. Reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI,” Ruddaraju wrote in his farewell message. “Jensen Huang was right, Elon and his teams are singular in what they can achieve. Grateful to have played a small part in shaping the future of AI Compute from the inside,” his message added.
