Meet Uday Ruddaraju: The Hyderabad native scaling OpenAI’s infrastructure for GPT-5.6 and beyond

OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute. The elevation comes approximately a year after Ruddaraju joined the artificial intelligence company as Head of Compute and Infrastructure, following his departure from Elon Musk’s xAI.

Ruddaraju announced his new position via a LinkedIn post, reflecting on his first 12 months with the Microsoft-backed enterprise. He stated, as quoted by Business Today, "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."

Background and Career Journey

Originally from Hyderabad, India, Ruddaraju completed his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) before moving to the United States to secure a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. His professional career includes engineering and technical leadership roles at eBay and Robinhood, alongside an early college internship at Amazon Web Services.

Before moving to OpenAI in July 2025, Ruddaraju served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at xAI, where he played a central role in constructing the Colossus supercomputer.

Expanding Infrastructure Ambitions

In his promotion announcement, Ruddaraju outlined plans for a massive infrastructure scale-up to support future AI models. He noted, "We're on a mission to build the world's largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow."

He further emphasised that the roadmap ahead will require multidisciplinary collaboration across large-scale distributed systems, hardware manufacturing, and data centre design encompassing civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.