Pichai was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, and earned a B.Tech in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 1993. He then took an MS in materials science and engineering at Stanford University, where he was a Siebel Scholar, and an MBA from the Wharton School, where he was a Palmer Scholar. He began as a materials engineer, working in engineering and product management at Applied Materials, and then in management consulting at McKinsey & Company.
Pichai joined Google in 2004 and led product management for its client software, including Google Chrome and ChromeOS, and was largely responsible for Google Drive. He later oversaw Gmail and Google Maps. In March 2013 he took over Android from Andy Rubin, and Larry Page later appointed him product chief. Google named him its next chief executive on August 10, 2015, and he took the job in October 2015 when Alphabet was formed as Google's holding company.
Pichai joined Alphabet's board in 2017 and replaced Page as Alphabet's chief executive in December 2019. In December 2018 he answered questions from the House Judiciary Committee on political bias, privacy and Google's plans in China, telling members there were no current plans for a censored search engine there. Time named him among its 100 most influential people in 2016 and 2020.
In July 2026 Pichai told Alphabet's earnings call that Google Cloud revenue grew 82% year over year and its backlog reached $514 billion. He promised Gemini 3.5 Pro for June 2026 and canceled it in September; in August 2026 Demis Hassabis left DeepMind's chief executive seat for Koray Kavukcuoglu, a reshuffle Pichai framed as acceleration. Google released Gemini 4 Argon on October 13, 2026, priced at $2 per million tokens, and is testing whether its TPU chips can run in space.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
