OpenAI infrastructure and compute lead Sachin Katti announced on Wednesday, 14 October, that he is leaving his role after roughly a year at the company, CNBC reported. His successor will take charge of the organisation responsible for OpenAI’s infrastructure roadmap and the capacity it uses to train and serve its models.
Key points
- Katti says he is leaving to build something new and will remain an OpenAI adviser.
- An OpenAI spokesperson says Uday Ruddarraju, its CTO of compute, will replace him.
- OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030.
Katti leaves the Stargate work
Katti said in a LinkedIn post that he had “decided to move on to build something new.” He described a job spanning silicon, systems, data centres, energy, supply chains and financing, and said he was proud of what his teams had accomplished.
He joined OpenAI in late 2025 to work on its Stargate data-centre initiative, which had faced early delays amid stalled negotiations with SoftBank and Oracle, Investing.com reported. The publication reported that Katti later reached separate agreements with both firms and secured additional computing arrangements with providers including Amazon Web Services.
Katti said in a separate statement that he had confidence in Ruddarraju and the team taking the work forward. He also described himself as a builder looking ahead to another project.
Ruddarraju takes OpenAI’s compute brief
An OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC that Uday Ruddarraju, the company’s CTO of compute, will replace Katti and lead its overall compute organisation. Ruddarraju previously headed infrastructure engineering at xAI and joined OpenAI in July 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The organisation develops OpenAI’s infrastructure roadmap and works to ensure the company can train and serve its models. OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030 and is involved in multi-billion-dollar data-centre projects in Ohio, Texas and Georgia.
Those facilities are drawing political attention in the US. Republican and Democratic candidates have campaigned against data centres amid concerns about noise, electricity rates and water use.
Simo, Lightcap and Dresser left before Katti
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s product and business chief, said in July that she would move to an advisory role to focus on recovery after a “severe exacerbation of a chronic illness.” Brad Lightcap, a longtime OpenAI executive, and Denise Dresser, its revenue chief, left the company in August.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman said at the time that he did not consider the departures atypical for a young company. OpenAI’s prominence meant “every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise,” he said.
Katti will finish in his infrastructure role on 15 November and continue to support OpenAI as an adviser.
