OpenAI has again changed who runs its compute buildout. Uday Ruddarraju, a former xAI infrastructure chief who joined OpenAI in July 2025 and became its chief technology officer of compute this July, now leads the infrastructure and compute businesses, including the Stargate data center effort. He replaces Sachin Katti, who joined from Intel in November 2025, took over Stargate in March, and is leaving to build something new while remaining an adviser.
The turnover underneath is part of the story. Several data center leaders left OpenAI after Katti’s promotion, and Ruddarraju’s team has been reinforced by a stream of former xAI staff, including its head of data center build and delivery and multiple site and construction leads. OpenAI is, in effect, importing the xAI construction culture that built large campuses quickly in Memphis.
Under Katti, OpenAI leaned on expanded cloud partnerships while its own data center projects were slow to come online. Katti said the company secured double digit gigawatts of new compute capacity across projects in Ohio, Portsmouth and Georgia and with partners including Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Cerebras and CoreWeave. The company’s projected spending on computing power through 2030 is now put at about $750 billion, up from an earlier estimate of roughly $600 billion.
Ruddarraju framed the reorganisation as merging commercial strategy into engineering, arguing that chip, system and data center choices have to be made together with supply chain and delivery. Whether that fixes the execution gap is the open question: the constraint on OpenAI’s roadmap has been delivered capacity, not announced capacity.