Who is Uday Ruddaraju, who previously joined Elon Musk and is now the CTO of OpenAI?
Uday Ruddaraju first joined Elon Musk's xAI company, then moved to OpenAI in 2025. Now, a year later, he has been promoted to CTO at OpenAI. Who is Uday Ruddaraju, where did he study, and how did his career begin? Let's find out.
RJ Kesari News Desk: OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin tech executive Uday Ruddaraju to the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute. Prior to OpenAI, he was associated with Elon Musk's xAI company.
Announcing the news on LinkedIn, Ruddaraju spoke about his first year at OpenAI and described it as a great experience. He said his team focused on rapidly expanding the computing infrastructure needed to train advanced AI models.
Now, after just one year at OpenAI, he has been promoted to CTO of Compute, where he will oversee the computing infrastructure that supports the company's next-generation AI models.
According to Ruddaraju, the Compute team spent the last year bringing massive new computing capacity online, as well as building systems for networking, storage, and machine learning that power frontier AI models, including GPT-5.6.
"We're on a mission to build the world's largest compute footprint so AI can reach everyone and every workflow," he wrote on LinkedIn. "We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming.
There's a lot to build in civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering, large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center builds. We're hiring the best people across the stack."
From Hyderabad to OpenAI
Ruddaraju earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) in Hyderabad and interned at Amazon Web Services while still in college. He then moved to the United States to pursue a master's degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
His career has included stints at several major technology companies. After working at eBay from 2013 to 2018, he joined Robinhood and then moved to Elon Musk 's xAI company, where he served as head of infrastructure engineering.
At xAI, Ruddaraju led the team that built Colossus, the company's AI supercomputer powered by over 250,000 GPUs. When he left xAI in July 2025 to join OpenAI as head of compute and infrastructure, his move was described as one of OpenAI's biggest hires from Elon Musk's AI company.
Ruddaraju said working directly with Musk was one of the most valuable learning experiences of his career.
He wrote, "Thank you to Elon Musk and everyone at xAI for this special opportunity to help build something truly groundbreaking with Colossus. It was a great pleasure to be a part of such a massive mission and to see firsthand what relentless focus and execution really look like.