Published Jul 20, 2026 | 7:54 PM ⚊ Updated Jul 20, 2026 | 7:54 PM
Uday Ruddarraju, who has been appointed OpenAI's new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute. (Photo| X/ Uday Ruddarraju)
Synopsis: Uday Ruddarraju, hailing from Hyderabad, has been promoted to the post of OpenAI’s new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, less than a year after he joined the company. He previously worked for Elon Musk’s xAI.
Uday Ruddarraju, who is from Hyderabad, has been appointed OpenAI’s new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute. Ruddaraju’s appointment comes just a year after he joined the Artificial Intelligence (AI) giant.
Announcing the news, Ruddarraju, in a post on LinkedIn, said, “I’m excited to share that I’m stepping into the CTO, Compute role at OpenAI.”
Describing his time at OpenAI as “incredibly rewarding,” Ruddarraju also elaborated on the company’s mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint.
“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. As we scale, the problems only get harder that require pushing the frontiers and innovating across every layer (literally) of the stack,” he wrote.
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“We’re on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow. We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up. There is a lot to build across large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. We’re hiring exceptional people across the stack,” he added.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Ruddarraju worked for Elon Musk’s xAI before moving to OpenAI in 2025. He served as the Head of Infrastructure Engineering at xAI and contributed to building Colossus and training Grok 3. Before joining xAI, he held engineering leadership roles at X, Robinhood and eBay.
Ruddarraju graduated from Hyderabad’s Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology and holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. His big break came when he joined eBay, where he worked on cloud platforms.
BRS leader K T Rama Rao congratulated Ruddarraju in an X post.
“Many Congratulations to Uday. Happened to meet him personally recently. Very well deserved recognition,” he wrote.
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(Edited by Fayisa CA.)
