Sachin Katti, the executive in charge of OpenAI's infrastructure and compute, is leaving after roughly a year. The Wall Street Journal reported the move first on Wednesday, and Katti confirmed it on LinkedIn, saying he "decided to move on to build something new." His last day is November 15, and he'll stay on as an advisor.
Uday Ruddarraju replaces him and will lead OpenAI's entire compute organization, an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC. Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July 2025 after running infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk's xAI, and he's been OpenAI's CTO of compute. Data Center Dynamics notes he's been hiring a lot of his former xAI colleagues into the data center team.
Katti came over from Intel last fall and took over the Stargate data center effort in March. Several of OpenAI's data center leads, including Peter Hoeschele and Keith Heyde, left after that promotion. This is the second shakeup of that group in about seven months, and it lands while OpenAI is committed to multi-billion-dollar sites in Texas, Ohio, and Georgia and local fights over data centers are turning into midterm issues.
It's also the latest in a run of senior departures this year, after product chief Fidji Simo moved to an advisory role in July and Brad Lightcap and revenue chief Denise Dresser left in August.
— via CNBC