OpenAI has promoted Uday Ruddarraju to chief technology officer for Compute, a newly created role that underscores the critical importance of infrastructure in the AI arms race.
Ruddarraju, who joined OpenAI about a year ago as head of compute and infrastructure after leading infrastructure engineering at xAI, will oversee OpenAI’s global compute footprint. His appointment comes as AI companies race to secure the processing power, networking, and data center capacity needed to train increasingly capable foundation models.
“We’re on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow,” Ruddarraju wrote on LinkedIn. He outlined plans for a “very exciting compute ramp and roadmap” spanning large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center builds.
Before xAI, Ruddarraju held engineering leadership roles at Robinhood and eBay. His promotion reflects a broader industry trend: while new AI models attract headlines, companies are investing billions in the underlying infrastructure, with rivals including Anthropic, Google, and Meta similarly expanding their compute capacity.
