OpenAI is handing the keys to its Uday Ruddarraju">data center. He joined the company last year and stepped into the chief technology officer for compute role in July. Ruddarraju said the transition should be straightforward because he has already been working across the infrastructure group's engineering, construction, and technical tracks.
He has also coordinated with partners' leadership, including Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang. He added that the strategy and business leaders who reported to Sachin Katti will stay in their posts, which he expects will help stability. "Sachin has done an incredible job maintaining the commercial partnerships," he said.
Now "I have to spend more time on the commercial side."
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He joined OpenAI roughly a year ago and took charge of multiple major data center projects: an 8 gigawatt build in Ohio with SB Energy and Nvidia, and a Georgia site that is OpenAI's first project it both designed and directed. In a statement, Katti said, "I'm proud of what we've built and have total confidence in Uday and the team to carry it forward," adding, "I'm looking forward to building something new." Before OpenAI, he served as Intel Corp.'s chief technology and AI officer, co-founded two companies while a Stanford professor, and, by his own joke in March, did not have a "real job" until starting at Intel almost five years ago.
Teams responsible for securing, funding, and establishing data center capacity have experienced significant turnover. Chris Malone, an executive who helped oversee the data center buildout, left in August. Peter Hoeschele, a central figure in the high-profile Stargate infrastructure effort, departed to join Meta Platforms Inc. earlier this year, with two colleagues moving with him.
Since July, Katti had been running GPT-Infra, an effort that uses OpenAI models for work such as building semiconductors and infrastructure. He recently said customers are using OpenAI models in experiments aimed at creating central processing units and edge chips. That program will now sit with the company's chip chief, Richard Ho.
All of this is unfolding as CEO Sam Altman says the company will likely commit trillions of dollars to the physical footprint needed to train the next wave of models and bring AI to more people. For your wallet, leadership over the nuts and bolts of compute can shape who wins demand across power, construction, chips, and components, so execution and stability are the tells to watch.
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