OpenAI infrastructure lead Sachin Katti announced he will leave his role next month. Katti said, “My last day will be November 15, and I'll continue supporting OpenAI as an advisor after that.” Uday Ruddaraju will take over the compute unit. Katti helped secure massive compute resources during his short tenure.
OpenAI’s infrastructure and compute lead Sachin Katti has announced that he will leave his role next month. Katti, who joined OpenAI in November last year, says he is leaving to “build something new.”
“My last day will be November 15, and I'll continue supporting OpenAI as an advisor after that,” Sachin Katti wrote on X. He will be replaced by OpenAI CTO Uday Ruddarraju.
Sachin Katti was responsible for acquiring compute resources for OpenAI’s data centres. During his tenure, the company released its custom Jalapeno inference chip along with a $20 billion deal to use Cerebras’s AI chips. OpenAI also pushed for a reorganisation of its Stargate data centre project under Katti.
Who is Sachin Katti?
Sachin Katti also oversaw computing agreements with SB Energy and the expansion of OpenAI’s deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Katti claimed that under his leadership, the AI company “secured double-digit GWs of compute” for several data centre projects including those in Ohio, Portsmouth, and Georgia. He led OpenAI’s partnerships with the likes of NVIDIA, Oracle, Microsoft, and Google.
Before joining OpenAI, Katti was the chief technology officer at Intel. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. On LinkedIn, Sachin Katti said his career had taken him from academia as a Stanford professor to entrepreneurship, running a large business, serving as Intel’s CTO and helping orchestrate “one of the largest AI compute infrastructure buildouts in history” at OpenAI.
Sachin Katti has a PhD in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He completed his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay.
Katti’s successor, Uday Ruddarraju was previously OpenAI’s chief technology officer of compute. Ruddarraju will now lead the company’s overall compute organisation. He will report to OpenAI President Greg Brockman.
OpenAI’s compute organisation develops its infrastructure roadmap and ensures the company can train and serve its models. The company is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030 and is involved in multibillion-dollar data centre projects multiple US states. These include an eight-gigawatt project in Ohio with SB Energy and Nvidia and a Georgia site designed and led by OpenAI.
The change comes after several departures from OpenAI. Product and business chief Fidji Simo moved into an advisory role in July, while executives Brad Lightcap and Denise Dresser left the following month. Infrastructure executives Chris Malone and Peter Hoeschele have also departed. More recently, David Robinson, the company's safety lead, also resigned.
Brockman earlier said departures received greater scrutiny because OpenAI was in the spotlight. Katti expressed confidence in Ruddarraju and the compute team, adding: “I'm a builder at heart, and I'm looking forward to building something new.”