Hyderabad: The city added another name to its list of global tech leaders, with Hyderabad’s Uday Rudraraju taking over as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at OpenAI. His elevation comes nearly a year after he joined the company, following a stint as head of infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI.His journey from the classrooms at Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) to the US started in 2011 when he secured a seat at the University of Minnesota for a master’s in computer science engineering.Since then, he has worked at multiple firms like the e-commerce platform, e-bay and financial services company Robinhood in San Francisco, before joining Musk’s team.Now, as he takes over as CTO of Compute, the Rudraraju said he and his team are on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow.“We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up. There is a lot to build across large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data centre builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering,” he added and said that the first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding.In a LinkedIn post, he said that the Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems work across compute, network and storage, and ML (machine learning) needed to train frontier models like GPT-5. “As we scale, the problems only get harder, requiring us to push the frontiers and innovate across every layer (literally) of the stack,” he added.Back home in Hyderabad, his alma mater is predictably elated at the news of his new role.“His extraordinary journey from the classrooms of CBIT to shaping the future of artificial intelligence is a testament to excellence, perseverance, and visionary leadership. His achievements inspire every student to dream bigger, embrace innovation, and create meaningful impact across the world,” said C V Narasimhulu, principal of CBIT.
