In a significant turnaround in the artificial intelligence sector, Uday Ruddarraju, an Indian-origin engineer and former Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI, has shifted allegiance to OpenAI. His move represents a considerable talent realignment in the high-riding world of AI infrastructure.
Ruddarraju was a key player at xAI, overseeing the development of Colossus — a 200,000-plus GPU behemoth of a supercomputer — and guiding the training of Grok 3, a highly sophisticated AI model developed by xAI.
Looking back on his experience at xAI, Ruddarraju posted on X on July 8, “Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) was correct, Elon and teams are unique in what they can accomplish. Thankful to have had a small role in building the future of AI Compute from within.”
After an unforgettable ride, I’ve decided to move on from @xai and yesterday was my last day.
When I first joined, I thought everyone was absolutely nuts for thinking we could deploy 100K GPUs in 4 months, especially without a fully functioning site. Watching us go and double…
— Uday Ruddarraju (@udayruddarraju) July 8, 2025
He thanked Elon Musk and the team, stating, “Thanks @elonmusk and the entire xAI team for the privilege of getting to assist in creating something so fundamentally important with Colossus. It was an honor to be part of this mission and to observe from the inside what it means to have relentless focus and execution.” He also mentioned, “Reporting to Elon and learning directly from him was hands down the best aspect of working at xAI.”
Soon after leaving xAI, Ruddarraju was named one of four high-profile recruits at OpenAI. OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman posted the news in an internal Slack post, which was subsequently leaked. Ruddarraju replied, “Excited to join you, Greg Brockman!” in a re-share of the announcement.
He is joined at OpenAI by David Lau, a former Tesla senior software leader; Mike Dalton, who had previously been at xAI and Robinhood; and Angela Fan, a Meta AI researcher. Collectively, they have tremendous experience in AI infrastructure and high-scale computing.
Ruddarraju and Dalton will contribute to Stargate, OpenAI’s upcoming infrastructure project designed to power the next generation of AI systems. Speaking to Wired, Ruddarraju called Stargate “a high-stakes infrastructure challenge that aligns well with the kind of ambitious work” he enjoys.
