OpenAI has appointed Uday Ruddarraju to lead its infrastructure and compute businesses, running its Stargate and other data center efforts.

Ruddarraju joined OpenAI last July as head of compute and infrastructure and was named OpenAI's CTO of compute this July. His latest promotion was first reported by Bloomberg.

The former xAI exec, who served as head of infrastructure engineering at the SpaceX business, replaces Sachin Katti.

Katti joined from Intel in November 2025 and took over the Stargate data center effort this March. OpenAI data center heads Peter Hoeschele, Keith Heyde, Shamez Hemani, and Chris Malone left the company following Katti's promotion.

Under Katti, OpenAI expanded its cloud partnerships as in-house data center projects remain slow to come online. The company projects spending of about $750 billion on computing power through 2030, up from an earlier estimate of roughly $600bn.

Katti is expected to remain as an adviser.

"After an incredible year at OpenAI, I've decided to move on to build something new," Katti said in a post on LinkedIn.

"The past year has been extraordinary. We secured double-digit gigawatts of new compute capacity across Ohio, Portsmouth, Georgia, Trainium, and several other projects, working with incredible partners including Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Cerebras, and CoreWeave. We also got GPT-Infra off the ground, taking it from an idea to a real business with customers and partners in just three months

"AI is reshaping the entire computing stack, and I believe we're still in the early innings. I'm excited to bring everything I've learned across these experiences together and go build something new."

Ruddarraju's data center team has been increasingly bolstered by fellow former xAI (now SpaceXAI, soon SpaceXSI) employees, including OpenAI's head of data center build and delivery Brent Mayo.

Also of note are xAI's site lead Aakash Verma, data center infrastructure staffer Amin Golnabi, project manager Andrej Sulek, and construction project manager Johnathan Henley, who have all joined OpenAI.

This month, the former lead commissioning engineer at xAI, Michael Roberson, joined OpenAI's infrastructure division.

Ruddarraju said: "Today, we’re bringing our compute commercial strategy into the engineering organization I lead at OpenAI as the CTO of compute. As we build across the full stack, we believe technical decisions, commercial strategy, supply chain, and delivery need to be developed together. I want to use this opportunity to preview what we’re building next and share the conviction behind it. Compute is already the currency of invention and innovation.

"Working across providers, developing our own chips, and building data centers with our partners requires a deep understanding of how the entire system comes together. The choices we make about chips, systems, and data centers shape our supply chain and our ability to deliver capacity at the scale and pace our roadmap demands. Getting this right requires close technical, commercial, and delivery alignment with our partners."