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With his latest promotion, Uday Ruddarraju, a tech professional of Indian origin, has brought a proud moment to the country after being named OpenAI’s new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Compute team. Ruddarraju’s promotion comes nearly a year after he joined the company from Elon Musk’s xAI.

Who Is Uday Ruddarraju?

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ruddarraju studied computer science at Hyderabad’s Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT). While still in college, he secured an internship at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He later moved to the United States to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. Before taking on his current role at OpenAI, he held several positions and leadership roles at eBay, Robinhood, and other major tech firms. His last stint was at Elon Musk’s xAI, where he served as the Head of Infrastructure Engineering.

First Indian Promoted to OpenAI CTO Role

Sharing the major announcement on the social media platform LinkedIn, Ruddarraju wrote: “My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. 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, requiring us to push the frontiers and innovate across literally every layer of the stack.” “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 datacenter builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. We’re hiring exceptional people across the stack,” he added.

Left Elon Musk’s xAI to Join OpenAI

According to reports, Ruddarraju left xAI and joined OpenAI in 2025. His departure attracted significant attention, as he was among the senior infrastructure leaders working closely with Elon Musk. In a farewell message, he thanked xAI for the rare opportunity to help build something truly foundational with Colossus. “It was a privilege to be part of a mission this bold, and to see from the inside what relentless focus and execution really look like. Reporting to Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI,” he wrote.

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