Satya Nadella

Nadella was born in Hyderabad, India, and earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Mangalore University. Nadella then came to the United States and earned a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1990.314

After graduating from UWM, Nadella joined the Chicago office of Sun Microsystems as a member of the technology staff, and later earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1997.413

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and held leadership roles across both enterprise and consumer businesses, including vice president of the Microsoft Business Division. From 2008 to 2009 Nadella served as senior vice president of Search, Portal, and Advertising, and from 2009 to 2011 led research and development for the Online Services Division.12

Nadella became president of Server and Tools in 2011 and, in July 2013, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise group, where Nadella led Microsoft's shift to cloud infrastructure and services.21

Nadella became Microsoft's chief executive officer on February 4, 2014, and was appointed chairman of the board in June 2021. Microsoft states its mission as "to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more."52

With Nadella as CEO, Microsoft completed its acquisition of LinkedIn in December 2016 and of GitHub in October 2018, with GitHub continuing to operate independently and to remain an open platform for developers.67

In July 2019 Microsoft and OpenAI formed a partnership to build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, with OpenAI running its services on Azure and Microsoft becoming its preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies. Nadella said at the time that "AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time" and that "our ambition is to democratize AI."82

In March 2023 Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot, which Nadella called "the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing." A year later Nadella created Microsoft AI, a new organization focused on Copilot and consumer AI, and brought in DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead it. In March 2026 Nadella unified Microsoft's consumer and commercial Copilot work under a single Copilot Leadership Team while doubling down on Microsoft's superintelligence mission.91011

Microsoft today describes AI offerings that span every layer of the technology stack, from Azure AI Foundry, a unified platform for designing and managing AI applications and agents, to Microsoft Copilot. When the White House presented Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in October 2026, the citation recognized the construction of hyperscale infrastructure for training and deploying American superintelligence.212

Nadella serves on the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago, an alma mater, after first being elected in 2018, and received the UWM Chancellor's Innovation Award in 2013. Nadella is also the author of the book Hit Refresh.315

The Government of India conferred the Padma Bhushan on Nadella in 2022, Georgia Tech awarded Nadella an honorary Ph.D. in January 2024 for transformative leadership, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected Nadella a member in 2025.151314