Davuluri, an alumnus of IIT Madras, has been at Microsoft for 23 years and was involved in the company’s collaboration with Qualcomm and AMD to create custom Surface processors. In his new role, he will directly report to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s head of experiences and devices. Jha stated in a memo that Windows is again streamlining its Windows and devices team. “This will enable us to take a holistic approach to building silicon, systems, experiences, and devices that span Windows client and cloud for this AI era,” the memo read, per a report.
This comes a year after Microsoft split up its Windows and Surface groups, following Panos Panay’s exit from the company to join Amazon. Davuluri had led the Surface silicon and devices segment last year, while Mikhail Parakhin took over Windows and web experiences.
Davuluri joins an elite group of Indian Americans at the helm of Silicon Valley‘s tech giants. Google’s parent Alphabet is led by Madurai-born Sundar Pichai, also an IIT alumnus. Microsoft itself has Satya Nadella as chief executive, who has headed the company since 2014. Ravi Kumar S of Cognizant, Arvind Krishna of IBM, Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks, YouTube’s Neal Mohan and Shantanu Narayen of Adobe are some of the other prominent Indian-origin CEOs of global tech companies.
Also read | YouTube’s Neal Mohan is the newest Indian-origin CEO in the tech world
Last week, Microsoft roped in Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of Google’s DeepMind and Inflection AI, to lead its consumer AI business. The company also hired several team members of Inflection AI, including cofounder Karen Simonyan.
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Microsoft will be paying the AI startup $650 million to licence its software. As part of the deal, Microsoft will pay $620 million to the company to license and use its AI models. The remaining $30 million will be paid to give up any legal rights the company may hold related to the mass hiring.
