Hyderabad’s Ruddarraju from CBIT is OpenAI Compute CTO

Hyderabad-born Uday Ruddarraju has been elevated as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Compute at OpenAI, marking another global milestone for the city’s tech talent. His promotion comes nearly a year after he joined the organisation from xAI, where he led infrastructure engineering.

Ruddarraju’s journey began in Hyderabad at the Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), before he moved to the United States in 2011 to pursue a master’s degree in computer science engineering at the University of Minnesota. Over the years, he built his career across leading firms, including eBay and Robinhood in San Francisco.

At OpenAI, he initially led compute and infrastructure and has now stepped into the CTO role for Compute. In a LinkedIn post, Ruddarraju said his team is focused on building the world’s largest compute footprint to support frontier artificial intelligence models such as GPT-5.

“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 centre builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering,” he said, adding that his first year at the company had been highly rewarding.

He noted that the compute team has worked to rapidly bring new capacity online while developing systems across compute, networking, storage and machine learning required to train advanced AI models. “As we scale, the problems only get harder, requiring us to push the frontiers and innovate across every layer of the stack,” he added.

Back in Hyderabad, his alma mater CBIT expressed pride over his achievement. Principal C V Narasimhulu said Ruddarraju’s journey from the institute to leading advancements in artificial intelligence reflects excellence, perseverance and visionary leadership, and would inspire students to aim higher and innovate.