OpenAI’s infrastructure chief is leaving after about a year on the job, and the timing is awkward. Sachin Katti, the executive in charge of OpenAI’s computing capacity, announced Wednesday that he plans to step down next month. His departure lands just as the company ramps up what may be the biggest infrastructure bet in corporate history: roughly $750 billion in spending on computing power through 2030.

Katti wrote on LinkedIn that his last day will be November 15 and that he’ll stay on as an adviser. He said he’s leaving to build something new. Uday Ruddarraju, a former xAI executive who became OpenAI’s chief technology officer of compute in July, will take over both the infrastructure and compute businesses and will report to OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

The shakeup was first reported by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, with OpenAI expected to inform employees the same day. It’s the latest in a string of executive departures at the company, and it puts a relatively new face in charge of the physical backbone behind ChatGPT.

Why the OpenAI infrastructure chief role is so hard

Nobody would call this job a retirement post. Katti joined OpenAI in late 2025 with one clear assignment: rein in the Stargate data center effort, which had gotten off to a slow start after the company failed to reach a deal with SoftBank and Oracle. Instead of a single grand alliance, OpenAI forged deals with those firms separately, and Katti struck additional computing agreements with providers such as Amazon Web Services to keep capacity growing.

He moved fast. In August he helped lock in a 10-gigawatt data center lease with SB Energy that came with a financial guarantee from Nvidia, a deal that showed how entangled the AI industry’s money has become — a chipmaker backstopping an AI lab’s real estate. On LinkedIn, Katti described the year as “extraordinary,” writing that the team secured double-digit gigawatts of new compute capacity across Ohio, Georgia, Portsmouth and several other projects, and turned GPT-Infra from an idea into, in his words, “a real business with customers and partners in just three months.”

That’s a lot of money to spend without a leadership team you trust.

Ruddarraju takes the reins

Ruddarraju isn’t an outsider parachuted in cold. He joined OpenAI last year and has been running the engineering, construction and technical side of the infrastructure group for months. Before OpenAI, he headed infrastructure engineering at xAI, which makes him one of a growing cohort of former xAI people now running OpenAI’s physical plant — Data Center Dynamics reports his data center team has been increasingly bolstered by fellow ex-xAI hires.

“Sachin has done an incredible job maintaining the commercial partnerships,” Ruddarraju told Bloomberg. Now, he said, “I have to spend more time on the commercial side.”

The commercial side is the part that’s about to get scrutinized. OpenAI raised its projected compute spending to around $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, according to the Journal. Anthropic is racing OpenAI toward an IPO and showing investors sharp revenue growth, so every dollar OpenAI spends on data centers is now being weighed against a rival that will have to answer to public shareholders first. If Ruddarraju can keep the partner deals flowing and the builds on schedule, the leadership change becomes a footnote. If not, it becomes a headline.

A revolving door at the top

Katti’s exit continues a churn that has followed OpenAI all year. In July, Fidji Simo, the company’s product and business chief, moved into an advisory role, saying she needed to focus on recovering from a severe illness. The following month, longtime executive Brad Lightcap and revenue chief Denise Dresser both left. Another executive overseeing the data center buildout exited over the summer.

The infrastructure unit in particular has been unstable. When Katti took over in March, several data center executives — including Stargate veterans — departed afterward, per Data Center Dynamics. Chris Malone, who helped oversee the data center buildout, left in August, and Peter Hoeschele, who played a critical role in the Stargate initiative, exited for Meta earlier this year.

OpenAI president Greg Brockman has said the departures aren’t unusual for a young company moving this fast, arguing that OpenAI’s prominence means “every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise.” That’s fair. It’s also true that very few companies are trying to spend three-quarters of a trillion dollars on data centers with their second infrastructure chief in under two years.

What this means

The bigger question isn’t who signs the leases — it’s whether the spending pace survives contact with reality. Data centers have become politically toxic in parts of the US, with candidates from both parties campaigning against new builds over noise, electricity rates and water use. Utility regulators in several states are already asking who pays for the AI boom.

Meanwhile, investors are doing the math. Hundreds of billions in future computing commitments look different when your rival is about to file for an IPO and let the public grade the numbers. Ruddarraju’s job is to make sure OpenAI has the machines to keep up with Anthropic, Google and Meta — without becoming the executive who overbought at the peak.

Frequently asked questions

Why is OpenAI infrastructure chief Sachin Katti leaving?

Katti said in a LinkedIn post on October 14 that he’s leaving to build something new. His last day is November 15, and he’ll stay on as an adviser to OpenAI.

Who is Uday Ruddarraju, the new OpenAI compute chief?

Ruddarraju previously led infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI, joined OpenAI in 2025, and became chief technology officer of compute in July. He now leads both the infrastructure and compute businesses, reporting to president Greg Brockman.

What is OpenAI’s Stargate data center project?

Stargate is OpenAI’s flagship data center buildout plan. It got off to a slow start after a deal with SoftBank and Oracle fell through, which is what Katti was originally brought in to fix.

How much is OpenAI spending on computing?

OpenAI has raised its projected computing spend to about $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, per the Wall Street Journal.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, Data Center Dynamics.