Sundar Pichai

Pichai grew up in Chennai, India, and studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, earning a Bachelor of Technology from IIT Kharagpur and an Institute Silver Medal. In a 2026 commencement address at Stanford, Pichai recalled a childhood in which new technology arrived slowly, and described how imagining what lay beyond those limits led to a dream of working in Silicon Valley.139

Pichai came to Stanford University for graduate study and earned a Master of Science. It was at Stanford's Sweet Hall in 1993 that Pichai first gained regular access to computers, deepening an interest in technology's power to expand opportunity. Pichai later left a doctoral program for a job and completed the master's degree instead.931

Pichai then earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where Pichai was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar.31

Pichai joined Google in 2004, the year of a first meeting with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and helped lead the development of Google Toolbar and then Google Chrome. From March 2013 Pichai served as senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps.153

In 2014 Pichai was appointed to lead product and engineering for all of Google's products and platforms, including Search, Maps, Play, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Apps. In the letter announcing the creation of Alphabet, Larry Page wrote that Pichai "has really stepped up" and that it was time for Sundar to be CEO of Google.134

Pichai became Google's CEO in 2015 and joined the board of Alphabet, Google's parent company, in July 2017. In December 2019 Page and Brin announced that Sundar would be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet, noting that Pichai had "worked closely with us for 15 years," including through the formation of Alphabet.135

Under Pichai's leadership Google has focused on developing products and services, powered by the latest advances in AI, that offer help in moments big and small. Google has invested in new opportunities such as Google Cloud and YouTube and has continued to lead in advanced technologies including machine learning and quantum computing.12

Pichai has described Google as an AI-first company. In April 2023 Pichai brought together Google Research's Brain team and DeepMind into a single unit, Google DeepMind, uniting two leading research groups in the AI field to accelerate progress. That December, Pichai introduced Gemini 1.0, available in Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, writing that the transition underway with AI "will be the most profound in our lifetimes."76

At Google I/O in May 2026, Pichai welcomed what Google calls the agentic Gemini era, introducing Gemini 3.5 Flash, the new Gemini Omni model family, the Gemini Spark personal agent, and eighth-generation TPUs split into chips for training and for inference. The keynote framed Google's approach as a full stack, from custom silicon and research to models and everyday products.8

Speaking to Stanford's graduating class in June 2026, Pichai encouraged graduates to choose optimism, pursue hard problems, and do what excites them. In 2026 Pichai was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.92