OpenAI Hands Former xAI Executive the Keys to Its AI Infrastructure Empire

OpenAI has appointed a former xAI executive to lead the company’s infrastructure and compute business, as the company looks to expand its data center capacity.

Uday Ruddarraju joined the artificial intelligence company last year as head of compute and infrastructure. He was promoted in July to chief technology officer, compute, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Before joining OpenAI, Ruddarraju led infrastructure and engineering at xAI for a little over a year. He has also held similar roles at Robinhood and eBay.

Sachin Katti, who led the infrastructure unit, will step down over the next several weeks and will remain with the company as an adviser, Bloomberg reported.

Since joining OpenAI roughly a year ago, Katti has managed several major data center projects including an 8-gigawatt Ohio development with SB Energy and Nvidia and a Georgia facility that OpenAI designed and is leading itself.

"After an incredible year at OpenAI, I’m moving on to build something new in a few weeks…AI is reinventing computing. Excited to bring everything I’ve learned together to build what’s next. Grateful to the incredible OpenAI team. I’ll continue as an advisor after Nov. 15. More soon!" Katti wrote in a post on X announcing his departure.

Katti previously spent 16 years as a Sanford University professor and worked as Intel Corporation’s chief technology and AI officer.

In July, Katti took charge of GPT-Infra, leading efforts to apply OpenAI’s models to semiconductor design and develop infrastructure. He recently noted that customers were already testing the models to develop central processing units (CPUs) and edge chips. 

The initiative will now be overseen by Richard Ho, who leads OpenAi’s chip efforts.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has projected that the company will spend trillions of dollars on the infrastructure that is required to build more advanced AI models and expand the technology’s use. 

In recent months, several executives involved in securing, financing, and developing data center capacity have left the company, Bloomberg noted.

Chris Malone, who was involved in managing OpenAI’s data center expansion, departed the company in August. Earlier this year, Peter Hoeschele, a key figure in the company’s Stargate infrastructure project, joined Meta Platforms alongside two other colleagues.

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