OpenAI Names Uday Ruddarraju CTO of Compute as Capacity Expands

Uday Ruddarraju has become OpenAI’s chief technology officer of compute, overseeing infrastructure for its AI models and capacity expansion.

Ruddarraju announced the appointment about a year after joining OpenAI as head of compute and infrastructure. The role spans computing capacity, networking, storage and model-training systems.

OpenAI’s compute team has brought capacity online and built systems for training frontier models, including GPT-5.6, Ruddarraju said. He described the work as reaching across distributed systems, hardware manufacturing and data center construction.

Before joining OpenAI in July 2025, Ruddarraju led infrastructure engineering at xAI and worked on its Colossus AI supercomputer. The cluster reached 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

Ruddarraju said OpenAI aims to build “the world’s largest compute footprint.” The appointment announcement did not detail the scope of his authority or set a target for the infrastructure expansion.