Sachin Katti Is Leaving OpenAI. Uday Ruddarraju Now Runs Compute and Infrastructure

Sachin Katti, who has led OpenAI's infrastructure organization for about a year, will leave the role on November 15 and stay on as an advisor. Uday Ruddarraju, OpenAI's chief technology officer for compute since July, will now lead both the infrastructure and compute organizations, according to CNBC and Bloomberg reporting cited by PYMNTS. Katti wrote on LinkedIn that he had decided to move on and build something new.

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What Ruddarraju Takes On

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The job is far larger than it was a year ago. Katti said OpenAI secured "double-digit gigawatts" of new compute capacity over the past year. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI now expects to spend about $750 billion on computing power through 2030, up from the $600 billion figure reported earlier in 2026.

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Ruddarraju credited Katti with maintaining OpenAI's commercial partnerships and said he will need to spend more time on the commercial side himself. That is the clearest signal of where the gap sits: the successor comes from engineering, and the departing executive ran the deals.

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[Table 1]

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The Third Infrastructure Exit This Year

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Katti is not the first senior infrastructure leader to leave in 2026. Chris Malone, who helped oversee OpenAI's data center buildout, left in August, and Peter Hoeschele, a central figure in the Stargate initiative, left for Meta earlier in the year, PYMNTS reported. Three departures in the same function within a year leave OpenAI relying on 1 executive for both the technical and commercial sides of its largest spending line.

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A Short Tenure on Both Ends

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Katti arrived at OpenAI in late 2025 from Intel, where he had been chief technology officer and AI chief for about 7 months, Tom's Hardware reported at the time. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan took AI under his direct control after the exit, and Intel did not confirm a permanent CTO until May 2026, when it named interim chief Pushkar Ranade to the role (Intel). Katti's next move, a company of his own, follows a pattern among senior AI infrastructure leaders who turn a year of large-scale buildout experience into a founder bet.

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[Table 2]

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Succession by Promotion

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OpenAI filled the seat from inside. Ruddarraju joined from xAI in July 2025, where he led infrastructure engineering for xAI and X, and earlier spent nearly 6 years at Robinhood (National CIO Review). He has now been promoted twice in about 15 months. The pool of executives who have negotiated gigawatt-scale capacity is small, and an internal successor avoids a months-long external search while spending commitments keep growing.

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The trade-off is concentration. With compute strategy, data center buildout and commercial partnerships under 1 leader, OpenAI's next infrastructure hire is likely to be a commercial or partnerships executive reporting to Ruddarraju. For boards at AI infrastructure companies, the lesson is to name a deputy for each half of the job before the person running both decides to leave.

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Related: Brad Lightcap is leaving OpenAI and Google reshuffles its AI leadership.