OpenAI's Katti to step down as Ruddarraju takes over computing

OpenAI's head of infrastructure and computing, Sachin Katti, is stepping down next month and will be succeeded by Uday Ruddarraju, the company's CTO of computing, according to aitimes.com.

Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July 2025 as an infrastructure engineering leader from xAI and was promoted to CTO of the computing division in July 2026. In the role he will report to President Greg Brockman and oversee OpenAI's overall computing strategy.

Katti, who joined OpenAI from Intel roughly a year ago, said on LinkedIn that he decided to leave to build something new, and will remain at the company as an adviser. The GPT-Infra project he had led since July 2026 will be transferred to Richard Ho, who heads OpenAI's chip division.

The change comes as OpenAI has raised its computing spending forecast through 2030 from 600 billion dollars to 750 billion dollars.

Departed infrastructure figures

Earlier in 2026, Peter Hoeschele, a key figure in building the Stargate infrastructure, left for Meta along with two colleagues, and in August 2026 Chris Malone, who oversaw data center construction, left OpenAI. Stargate, initially pursued jointly with SoftBank and Oracle, was delayed from the start by contract negotiations, after which OpenAI signed individual deals with those companies and secured extra capacity from providers such as Amazon Web Services.

In August 2026, OpenAI signed a data center lease in Ohio with SB Energy that included financial backing from Nvidia, and pursued a Georgia project designed and led by OpenAI itself.