Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella is the chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft, a role he has held since February 2014 after more than two decades inside the company. Born in Hyderabad, India, in 1967, Nadella earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology before moving to the United States, where he completed a master's in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and later an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 after a spell at Sun Microsystems, and spent much of his career building out the company's server, tools and enterprise cloud businesses, eventually leading the Server and Tools division and then the broader Cloud and Enterprise group. That background positioned him to become the chief architect of Microsoft's pivot from a Windows-and-Office licensing business to a cloud-first, subscription-driven company centred on Azure, its data-centre and cloud-computing platform.

As CEO, Nadella has overseen a cultural and strategic transformation frequently credited with reviving Microsoft's fortunes, growing its market capitalisation many times over and restoring it to the ranks of the world's most valuable companies. He championed a 'growth mindset' culture, pushed Microsoft deeper into open source, and struck a series of consequential acquisitions, including LinkedIn, GitHub and Activision Blizzard, each extending Microsoft's data and platform reach.

His most consequential recent decision has been Microsoft's deep, multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI, which embedded generative AI across Azure, Microsoft 365 and Windows and made Microsoft's cloud one of the primary venues where frontier AI models are trained and served. That bet has made Nadella a central figure in the global buildout of AI data-centre capacity, as Microsoft races alongside Amazon and Google to secure chips, power and land for ever-larger AI infrastructure.

Nadella has been widely recognised for this turnaround, including Time 100 honours and the Financial Times' Person of the Year in 2019, and was awarded India's Padma Bhushan civilian honour in 2022. He continues to steer Microsoft's enormous capital expenditure on AI infrastructure, a decision set that shapes global demand for chips, power and cloud capacity as much as any single executive's.