OpenAI Infrastructure Chief Sachin Katti to Exit After a Year; Compute CTO Uday Ruddarraju Takes the Reins

OpenAI is handing its most operationally critical job to an executive who joined the company just 15 months ago. Sachin Katti, who has led the startup's infrastructure and compute organization for roughly a year, announced on Wednesday that he is leaving the role, with his last day set for Nov. 15. He will remain an advisor afterward.

"Building AI infrastructure at this scale has given me an incredible view into every dimension of the compute world, from silicon and systems to datacenters, energy, supply chains, financing, and the economics of AI," Katti wrote in a LinkedIn post explaining that he had "decided to move on to build something new."

His successor inherits one of the largest infrastructure mandates in the private economy. Uday Ruddarraju, who has been OpenAI's CTO of compute, will take over the broader compute organization, a company spokesperson told CNBC. Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July 2025 after serving as head of infrastructure engineering at xAI, Elon Musk's AI lab that was acquired by SpaceX earlier this year — the team behind training Grok 3 on a 100,000-GPU cluster.

The compute organization sits at the center of OpenAI's strategy: it sets the infrastructure roadmap and is responsible for making sure the company can train and serve its models. The scale of the mandate is enormous. OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030 — a target, not money already spent — and is involved in multi-billion-dollar data center projects in Ohio, Texas and Georgia.

The timing is not incidental. Katti's exit lands during a tense stretch for AI infrastructure in the United States, where backlash over noise, electricity rates and water consumption has made data centers a genuine flashpoint in the upcoming midterm elections, with candidates from both parties campaigning against new facilities. Whoever runs OpenAI's compute buildout now has to navigate local politics as much as supply chains.

The departure is also the latest in a string of executive exits from OpenAI this year. Product and business chief Fidji Simo said in July she would move to an advisory role to focus on her health, and longtime executive Brad Lightcap and revenue chief Denise Dresser both left the following month. President Greg Brockman, addressing that wave in August, argued the churn was not unusual for a young company under a spotlight: "I'm a constant, Sam [Altman] is a constant, and I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity."

The handoff is an internal promotion rather than an outside hire, which suggests continuity in how OpenAI is approaching its infrastructure roadmap. But the decision to move on from an infrastructure lead after only a year — at the exact moment the company's spending commitments are scaling toward half a trillion dollars — is the kind of detail rivals and investors will read closely. For now, the stated message is confidence: "I'm proud of what we've built and have total confidence in Uday and the team to carry it forward," Katti said in a statement.