OpenAI is combining its data centre builds and compute clusters under a single leader. Former xAI executive Uday Ruddarraju will now manage both operations, stepping into the top post as infrastructure chief Sachin Katti prepares to step down in the coming weeks.
Bloomberg reported the corporate shakeup on Wednesday. Katti, who arrived from Intel late last year, plans to transition into an advisory role while keeping existing direct reports in place under Ruddarraju.
Ruddarraju moved to OpenAI in July 2025 after directing infrastructure at Elon Musk's xAI, where he worked on the 100,000-GPU training setup used for Grok 3. OpenAI quietly named him chief technology officer for compute this past July. At the time, the startup confirmed its previous data centre director had stepped aside, though it declined to publicise Ruddarraju's identity until now.
Ruddarraju told Bloomberg that Katti handled commercial relationships well, adding that he expects a clean transition as he spends more time tending to vendor and partner contracts.
Shifting Mega-Projects and Chip Design
Katti departs after steering two of OpenAI's most ambitious hardware pushes on American soil. He directed the $30 billion development in Georgia, marking the first facility OpenAI designed and operated on its own. He also managed an 8-gigawatt development in Ohio alongside SB Energy and Nvidia. A securities filing uncovered by Axios showed Nvidia backed that site with lease and power guarantees reaching as high as $105 billion.
Work on custom silicon is shifting as well. Katti had been running GPT-Infra, an internal effort that applies OpenAI models to chip design. That responsibility now transfers to Richard Ho, the company's head of silicon hardware. Ho remarked earlier this month that he does not yet completely trust architectural revisions generated by models.
The leadership shift caps several months of departures across OpenAI's physical infrastructure teams. Chris Malone exited earlier this year, while Stargate contributor Peter Hoeschele left for Meta alongside engineers Keith Heyde and Shamez Hemani.
What Ruddarraju takes over is overwhelmingly concentrated inside the United States. While OpenAI pitched an international footprint, European expansion has stalled. The group halted Stargate UK in April after facing power prices four times steeper than American rates, alongside unresolved local copyright regulations. The Guardian later revealed OpenAI staff had not actually visited the north-east England location before announcing it.
That leaves an announced 230-megawatt facility in Norway, revealed in July 2025, as its sole disclosed European outpost. The Ohio hub alone dwarfs that site by roughly 35 times. With an internal compute projection of $856 billion shown to prospective investors, Ruddarraju will be spending almost all of that budget stateside.
TBFiled by The Tech Business Desk
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