OpenAI has appointed Uday Ruddarraju to lead its infrastructure and compute businesses, running its Stargate and other data center efforts.

Ruddarraju joined OpenAI last July as head of compute and infrastructure, and was named OpenAI's CTO of Compute this July. His latest promotion was first reported by Bloomberg.

The former xAI exec, who served as head of infrastructure engineering at the SpaceX business, replaces Sachin Katti.

Katti joined from Intel in November 2025, and took over the Stargate data center effort this March. OpenAI data center heads Peter Hoeschele, Keith Heyde, Shamez Hemani, and Chris Malone left the company following Katti's promotion.

Under Katti, OpenAI expanded its cloud partnerships as in-house data center projects remain slow to come online. The company projects spending about $750 billion on computing power through 2030, up from an earlier estimate of roughly $600bn.

Katti is expected to remain as an adviser.

Ruddarraju's data center team has been increasingly bolstered by fellow former xAI (now SpaceXAI, soon SpaceXSI) employees, including OpenAI's head of data center build and delivery Brent Mayo.

Also of note are xAI's site lead Aakash Verma, data center infrastructure staffer Amin Golnabi, project manager Andrej Sulek, and construction project manager Johnathan Henley, who have all joined OpenAI.

This month, the former lead commissioning engineer at xAI, Michael Roberson, joined OpenAI's infrastructure division.