Sanjay Ghemawat grew up in Kota and helped build Google, now he is suddenly leaving

Google saw some high-profile exits on Wednesday, including that of Sanjay Ghemawat. Considered a rockstar in the world of tech, Sanjay grew up in Kota. Now, he is suddenly leaving Google after spending 27 years at the company.

In Short

• Sanjay Ghemawat has spent nearly 27 years building Google 
• Ghemawat has been a key figure behind Google’s success
• Ghemawat spent his formative years as a teenager in Kota

Every time you use Google and get amazed by its speed, whether it is search speed or how fast you access your Google Drive files or how smoothly YouTube videos stream, you use a system that has been built brick-by-brick by Google scientists like Sanjay Ghemawat. But who is Sanjay Ghemawat?

You might not have heard his name as much as Sundar Pichai’s. Or that of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but scientists like Sanjay and Jeff Dean have built Google infrastructure since 2000. They are the people who make Google arguably the world’s most accomplished tech company in the world. Now they are leaving, including Ghemawat.

It is the end of an era at Google. Though Ghemawat has largely stayed out of the spotlight, he has helped build some of Google's most important computing systems, including MapReduce, the Google File System and Bigtable, which are used by almost all Google products, from the humble Google Keep to mighty Gemini AI.

In other words, Google’s key advantage over others comes from its backend infrastructure which is considered the best in the world. It has been the work of Sanjay, among others. But long before he joined Google and helped shape the company's technological backbone, Sanjay’s life journey took shape in Kota, Rajasthan.

A teenager in Kota

Sanjay Ghemawat was born in West Lafayette, Indiana, to Indian parents while his father was pursuing a PhD at Purdue University. The family later returned to India when his father took up a teaching position at the University of Kota.

Ghemawat spent much of his childhood in Kota, Rajasthan, and grew up in the city now known as India's education capital before returning to the United States to pursue higher education. In fact, some sources indicate that he went to Kota’s St Paul’s School on Mala Road in Kota. He completed his school education in 1982 and then, following the example of his father, went to the US for college.

Ghemawat earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Cornell University before completing a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before joining Google in 1999, Ghemawat worked at DEC Systems Research Center, where met his fellow computer scientist Jeff Dean, a meeting that sparked a lifelong collaboration and friendship that still continues as both leave Google together to start a new company.

On Wednesday night, Dean posted on X, giving a shoutout to his friend. “Oh look! My longtime friend and colleague @Sanjay_Ghemawat is now on Twitter! Give him a follow!”

The two storied scientists, then just finishing their studies in 1990s, worked on projects including a Java compiler and a system profiling tool before reuniting at Google, where they went on to build some of the most influential technologies in modern computing.

Nearly three decades later, the two are embarking on a new journey together, this time as co-founders of AI startup Discovery Loop.

Sanjay Ghemawat’s journey in Google

Ghemawat joined Google in late 1999, when the company was still a new search engine. Over the next two decades, Ghemawat became one of the architects of Google's technical foundation.

Alongside Jeff Dean, he helped create the Google File System (GFS), which made it possible to store and manage huge amounts of data across thousands of computers. The pair also developed MapReduce, a system that made processing massive datasets much faster and later inspired popular open-source tools such as Apache Hadoop.

Ghemawat also helped develop Bigtable, Google's system for storing vast amounts of information, and Spanner, a database that keeps data in sync across servers around the world. He later worked on technologies such as Protocol Buffers, TensorFlow and Pathways, and contributed to Google's AI research, including the PaLM language model.

Together, these technologies gave Google the foundation it needed to expand beyond search into cloud computing and artificial intelligence. And ultimately grow as one of the tech titans.

Their work at Google has been so influential that they have been awarded again and again. Ghemawat, for example, was elected to the American National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and then to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. In a joint recognition, Ghemawat and Dean also received the ACM Prize in Computing for their work on internet infrastructure and then the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.

Why is Sanjay Ghemawat leaving Google?

Now, Ghemawat is taking on a new challenge alongside his longtime collaborator, Jeff Dean. Joining them are former Google DeepMind vice-president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le as they launch Discovery Loop, a new AI startup. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation and is backed by Alphabet as a founding investor and cloud computing partner.

Reports note that Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried very hard to keep Ghemawat, Dean and others within the company but they had made up their mind.

Discovery Loop aims to use AI to speed up scientific and engineering research. Speaking to The New York Times, Dean said the goal is to "more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," enabling both a greater number and higher quality of experiments.

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