Archive · 19 Jul 2026
OpenAI Promotes Indian-Origin Techie to Compute CTO
Uday Ruddarraju, an Indian tech expert, has been promoted to a big job at OpenAI.
He is now the Chief Technology Officer for Compute.
Before this, he worked at another AI company called xAI, which is owned by Elon Musk.
At xAI, he helped build a supercomputer with lots of powerful computer parts.
Uday is excited about his new role and wants to hire more people to help build even bigger and better computers for AI.
He studied in India and the United States and has worked for other big companies like eBay and Robinhood.
Uday thinks his new job is very important because it will help bring advanced AI to everyone.
Uday Ruddarraju promoted to CTO, Compute at OpenAI after 12 months.
Previously led infrastructure engineering at xAI, building supercomputer Colossus.
Successfully trained Grok 3 at xAI, doubling initial GPU deployment goals.
OpenAI aims to build the world's largest compute footprint for frontier AI.
Ruddarraju is hiring exceptional people across various engineering disciplines.
- Who
- Uday Ruddarraju, an Indian-origin tech executive
- What
- Promoted to Chief Technology Officer for Compute at OpenAI
- When
- After 12 months at OpenAI, previously worked at xAI for over a year
- Where
- OpenAI and xAI (both AI startups)
- Why
- To lead OpenAI's mission to build the world's largest compute footprint for frontier AI
- Name
- Uday Ruddarraju
- New Role
- CTO, Compute at OpenAI
- Previous Role
- Head of Compute and Infrastructure at OpenAI
- Previous Employer
- xAI (Elon Musk's AI company)
- Education
- Master of Science in Computer Science from University of Minnesota, Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad
- Notable Projects
- Built supercomputer Colossus with over 250,000 GPUs at xAI
- Key Achievement
- Successfully trained Grok 3 at xAI
- Hiring Message
- OpenAI is hiring exceptional people across the stack