OpenAI poached him from Elon Musk's xAI to build its supercomputer. A year later, he's CTO of Compute. OpenAI promoted Uday Ruddaraju to Chief Technology Officer of Compute this week, elevating the engineer who spent the past year building the company's infrastructure after jumping from Elon Musk's xAI.
Ruddaraju announced the move on LinkedIn, calling his first 12 months at OpenAI "incredibly rewarding." His Compute team, he said, had focused on bringing capacity online while building the systems needed to train frontier models including 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," he wrote. The promotion caps a rapid rise.
Ruddaraju joined OpenAI in July 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure, the same month he left xAI where he served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering. At xAI, he led the team that built Colossus, the company's massive AI supercomputer with over 100,000 GPUs that trained the Grok 3 model.
"Watching us go and double that, and most importantly successfully train Grok 3 made me incredibly proud," Ruddaraju wrote in his July 2025 farewell post on X.
Now his mandate is even bigger. OpenAI is working toward what Ruddaraju called "the world's largest compute footprint" so frontier AI can reach more users and workflows. The company has an aggressive compute expansion roadmap and is hiring across distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data center engineering.
Ruddaraju's career path is notable for another reason: he earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, not from India's prestigious IITs or NITs. After an internship at Amazon Web Services, he moved to the US for a master's degree at the University of Minnesota.
He spent over five years at eBay between 2013 and 2018, then nearly six years at Robinhood, rising from Staff Software Engineer to Senior Director of Engineering and Head of Infrastructure. He joined xAI in June 2024 before OpenAI recruited him a year later.
"Reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI," Ruddaraju said in his farewell message, adding that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was right that Musk and his teams are "singular in what they can achieve." The recruitment of Ruddaraju from xAI was one of the most prominent executive poaches between the two AI companies. Now he's leading the compute race from the other side.
