Thomas Kurian

Thomas Kurian is the chief executive officer of Google Cloud, the cloud computing division of Alphabet Inc., a role he has held since early 2019. Born in 1966 in Pampady, a village in Kerala, India, Kurian moved to the United States at age 17 to study electrical engineering at Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude, before earning an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Kurian spent roughly six years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company before joining Oracle Corporation in 1996, where he built a 22-year career rising to president of product development and sitting on Oracle's executive committee. At Oracle, he oversaw a global engineering organisation of tens of thousands of people and a multi-billion-dollar research and development budget, helping shape Oracle's database, middleware and cloud applications businesses before departing in 2018.

He joined Google in November 2018 and was named CEO of Google Cloud in early 2019, tasked with closing the gap between Google's cloud infrastructure business and the market leaders, AWS and Microsoft Azure. Kurian brought an enterprise sales discipline from his Oracle years that had been seen as a relative weakness at Google, restructuring the sales organisation, deepening partnerships with systems integrators, and pushing harder into regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and government.

Under Kurian, Google Cloud has grown substantially and turned consistently profitable, aided heavily by demand for the custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that Google designs for AI training and inference, positioning Google Cloud as a genuine alternative to Nvidia-based infrastructure for large AI workloads. Google Cloud's integration of the Gemini model family and its infrastructure has made Kurian a key figure in the AI infrastructure race alongside Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Amazon's Andy Jassy.

Kurian is the identical twin brother of George Kurian, chief executive of NetApp, making the pair a rare case of twin siblings simultaneously leading major technology infrastructure companies. He has been recognised by groups including Gold House as one of the most impactful Asian Americans in business, and continues to lead Google Cloud's push to expand data-centre capacity and AI services globally.