OpenAI’s Sachin Katti to leave infrastructure role, stay on as advisor

Key points

• Sachin Katti announced Wednesday he is leaving his infrastructure role at OpenAI after about a year.
• Uday Ruddarraju, OpenAI's CTO of compute, will replace Katti and lead the compute organization.
• Katti's last day is Nov. 15, and he will continue as an advisor while pursuing something new.

OpenAI's infrastructure lead, Sachin Katti, said Wednesday that he is leaving his role after roughly a year at the artificial intelligence company. In a LinkedIn post, Katti said he had "decided to move on to build something new" and will remain an advisor after his last day on Nov. 15.

Uday Ruddarraju, who has been OpenAI's CTO of compute, will replace Katti and lead the company's overall compute organization, a spokesperson said. Ruddarraju joined OpenAI in July of last year and previously led infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk's xAI, which SpaceX acquired earlier this year.

What Katti said

Katti wrote that building AI infrastructure at this scale gave him a broad view of the compute world, from silicon and systems to datacenters, energy, supply chains, financing and the economics of AI. He said he is proud of what the teams accomplished and grateful to partners who helped.

In a statement, Katti said he has total confidence in Ruddarraju and the team to carry the work forward. He described himself as a builder at heart and said he looks forward to building something new.

I'm a builder at heart, and I'm looking forward to building something new.

— Sachin Katti

Compute strategy and context

OpenAI's compute organization develops the company's infrastructure roadmap and ensures it can train and serve its models. OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030 and is involved in multi-billion-dollar data center projects in Ohio, Texas and Georgia.

The leadership change comes amid U.S. backlash over data centers, including concerns about noise, electricity rates and water consumption. The issue has become a flashpoint in the upcoming midterm elections, with Republican and Democratic candidates campaigning against the facilities.

Recent executive departures

Katti's exit is the latest in a string of executive departures at OpenAI this year. In July, product and business chief Fidji Simo said she would move to an advisory role to focus on recovery after a severe exacerbation of a chronic illness. The next month, longtime executive Brad Lightcap and revenue chief Denise Dresser also left.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC at the time that he does not believe the wave of departures is atypical for a young company. He said that because OpenAI is in the spotlight, "every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn't otherwise."