Sachin Katti, OpenAI’s infrastructure and compute lead, said on Oct. 14 that he’s leaving the role after roughly a year at the company, CNBC’s Ashley Capoot reported. His last day is Nov. 15, and he’ll stay on as an advisor.
Katti said in a LinkedIn post that he “decided to move on to build something new.” He didn’t say what. “I’m a builder at heart, and I’m looking forward to building something new,” he said in a statement.
Uday Ruddarraju, who has been OpenAI’s CTO of compute, will lead the company’s overall compute organization, a spokesperson told CNBC. “I’m proud of what we’ve built and have total confidence in Uday and the team to carry it forward,” Katti said.
What Katti oversaw
Katti joined OpenAI from Intel in November 2025 and took over the Stargate data center effort in March, DCD’s Sebastian Moss reported. Several OpenAI data center leaders left after that change, according to DCD.
In his LinkedIn post, quoted by DCD, Katti said his team “secured double-digit gigawatts of new compute capacity” across projects including Ohio and Georgia. He listed partners including Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, Oracle, Microsoft, Google and AWS. He also said the team took a business called GPT-Infra “from an idea to a real business with customers and partners in just three months.”
OpenAI’s compute group sets the infrastructure plan that lets it train and serve its models.
The outlets cite different spending figures. CNBC said OpenAI is targeting about $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030. DCD said the company now projects about $750 billion through 2030, up from an earlier estimate of roughly $600 billion.
Who’s taking over
Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile as cited by CNBC. He was previously head of infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI, which SpaceX acquired earlier this year. DCD reported that he was named CTO of compute this July, and that Bloomberg first reported his promotion.
His team has added a number of former xAI staff, including OpenAI’s head of data center build and delivery, Brent Mayo, DCD reported.
Ruddarraju said OpenAI is bringing its compute commercial strategy into the engineering organization he leads. “As we build across the full stack, we believe technical decisions, commercial strategy, supply chain, and delivery need to be developed together,” he said, as quoted by DCD.
Katti’s exit is the latest of several senior departures at OpenAI this year, CNBC reported. In July, product and business chief Fidji Simo said she’d move into an advisory role for health reasons, and in August longtime executive Brad Lightcap and revenue chief Denise Dresser left.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC at the time that the departures weren’t unusual for a young company, and that “every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise.”
Source: CNBC, “OpenAI's Sachin Katti to leave infrastructure role, stay on as advisor”
Additional sources: DCD, Sebastian Moss, “OpenAI again shakes up data center leadership, with xAI exec Uday Ruddarraju to lead and Sachin Katti to leave”
