Who is Uday Ruddarraju? Indian-origin engineer to lead OpenAI's infrastructure and compute operations

OpenAI has appointed former xAI executive and Indian-origin engineer Uday Ruddarraju to head its infrastructure and compute operations, in the latest change in leadership among teams responsible for scaling the company's data centre capacity.

Ruddarraju joined OpenAI last year and took on the role of chief technology officer for compute in July.

Sachin Katti, who previously led the infrastructure team, is set to step away from the position over the coming weeks. He will continue to be associated with the company as an adviser.

In an interview, Ruddarraju said he expects the transition to be smooth, citing his previous involvement with the infrastructure team's engineering, construction and technical operations, according to Bloomberg. He has also engaged with senior executives at OpenAI's partners, including Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang.

He added that Katti's strategy and business teams would continue in their existing positions, helping ensure continuity during the leadership transition.

“Sachin has done an incredible job maintaining the commercial partnerships,” he said, further mentioning, now “I have to spend more time on the commercial side.”

Who is Uday Ruddarraju?

Born in Hyderabad, India, Ruddarraju studied at the Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) before pursuing further education at the University of Minnesota.

Prior to joining OpenAI, he led infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk's xAI and X. At xAI, he played a key role in building Colossus, one of the world's largest AI supercomputing clusters, which is used to train the company's Grok models.

What did Katti say?

During his tenure at OpenAI, which began about a year ago, Katti oversaw several major data centre initiatives. These included an 8-gigawatt project in Ohio involving SB Energy and Nvidia, as well as a facility in Georgia that is the first to be designed and led by OpenAI.

In a statement, Katti expressed confidence in the team taking forward the work he had overseen.

Garvit Bhirani