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Hyderabad: The city has added another name to its list of global tech leaders. Uday Ruddarraju, an alumnus of the Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer, Compute at OpenAI, nearly a year after joining the company from Elon Musk’s xAI, where he headed infrastructure engineering.

Ruddarraju announced the elevation in a LinkedIn post on Monday, July 21, saying his first 12 months at OpenAI had been “incredibly rewarding” and that the Compute team had worked to bring capacity online quickly and reliably while handling the systems work across compute, network, storage and machine learning needed to train frontier models such as GPT-5.6.

“We’re on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow,” he wrote, adding that the team had an “exciting compute ramp and roadmap” ahead spanning large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data centre builds across civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.

Ruddarraju studied computer science at CBIT before moving to the US in 2011 for a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. He interned at Amazon Web Services while still in college, and went on to work at eBay and Robinhood in San Francisco before joining xAI and, in July 2025, OpenAI as head of compute infrastructure.

His appointment comes as compute capacity has become a key competitive battleground in the AI industry, with OpenAI executives, including CFO Sarah Friar, saying the company has had to pass up opportunities this year because of compute shortages.