Sachin Katti, the executive running OpenAI’s computing buildout, is leaving the company in November, The Information reports. Other outlets report his last day is November 15 and that he’ll stay on as an adviser. Uday Ruddarraju, OpenAI’s CTO of compute, takes over the compute organization.
That’s a big seat to change hands. Katti controlled the part of OpenAI that turns huge spending pledges into working data centers, and he’s leaving about a year after he arrived.
⚡ The Quick Read
- Who: Sachin Katti, OpenAI’s head of compute and infrastructure. He joined in late 2025 after serving as Intel’s CTO and AI chief.
- When: He leaves in November. Several reports put his last day at November 15.
- What’s next for him: He has said he wants to start something new but hasn’t said what.
- Successor: Uday Ruddarraju, CTO of compute. Investing.com reports that he reports directly to President Greg Brockman.
- Stakes: Reports put OpenAI’s planned compute spending at about $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year.
🏗️ Why Katti Mattered
OpenAI didn’t hire Katti to do research. It hired him to fix a supply problem. The Stargate data center program had fallen behind schedule, and someone had to close the gap between headline announcements and chips actually running in buildings.
Over his year in the job, reports credit him with:
- Reaching separate agreements with SoftBank and Oracle, two of Stargate’s central partners
- Lining up extra capacity from other providers, including Amazon Web Services
- Moving OpenAI away from relying on any single compute supplier
That last point matters most. For years, OpenAI’s compute depended mostly on Microsoft. Katti’s job was to build a multi-vendor setup that could keep pace with OpenAI’s appetite for training and inference. He leaves while that setup is still being built.
🔍 Why This Matters
What stands out here is the timing. OpenAI just raised its compute spending target by about $150 billion, and the person who negotiated much of that capacity is walking out. Execution is now the hard part: turning signed contracts into power, buildings and installed GPUs on schedule.
There are a few ways to read it:
- Continuity is plausible. Ruddarraju already works inside the compute group, and Katti staying on as an adviser suggests a planned handoff rather than a blowup.
- Turnover remains a pattern. OpenAI has lost a long list of senior leaders over the past two years. Each exit adds to questions about how stable its leadership is.
- Scrutiny is rising. Some commentators link the move to possible IPO preparations and to questions about earlier Stargate capacity claims. Those links are speculation for now, but expect investors to look closely at how compute commitments are reported from here.
Katti’s title shows up differently across reports. Some call him head of computing capacity, while others call him the infrastructure lead. Whatever the title, his scope was the same: OpenAI’s physical compute.
📌 What Practitioners Should Watch
If you build on OpenAI’s API, nothing changes tomorrow. Compute leadership affects things you’ll feel later, like rate limits, capacity during new model launches, and how quickly new models roll out widely.
Keep an eye on these:
- Stargate milestones. Watch whether new sites come online when promised in the next two quarters.
- Partner terms. Look for any changes to the SoftBank, Oracle or AWS arrangements under new leadership.
- Katti’s next move. A former Intel CTO who just ran compute for the world’s most compute-hungry AI lab could start an infrastructure company worth watching.
- More departures. Watch whether other senior people from the compute group follow him out.
🔭 Looking Ahead
OpenAI’s whole strategy assumes compute will keep scaling on schedule. Katti helped lay the commercial groundwork for that. Now Ruddarraju has to build on it at a spending pace no AI company has tried before. How that handoff goes will say more about OpenAI’s next two years than any model launch. Full details are available in the original report from The Information.