Google's Sanjay Ghemawat bows out after 27 years to build AI-driven Discovery

For nearly three decades, Sanjay Ghemawat worked mostly out of the spotlight, quietly writing the code that underpinned Google's biggest products. That changes now: the Indian-American computer scientist has left Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a new venture built to automate complex scientific and engineering experiments.

Ghemawat was born in West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1966. He studied at Cornell before earning a PhD from MIT in 1995. Before Google existed, he worked at DEC's Systems Research Center, where he met Jeff Dean: a partnership that would define both their careers. Dean joined Google first; Ghemawat followed in 1999. Together they built the Google File System, MapReduce, Bigtable, and Spanner, systems that shaped how the modern internet handles data at scale. Ghemawat was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and won the ACM Prize in Computing in 2012, leaving Google as a Senior Fellow in its Systems Infrastructure Group.

Discovery Loop, co-founded with Dean, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation aimed at automating machine learning and scientific research to speed up technological breakthroughs. It has secured a strategic computing and cloud partnership with Alphabet, alongside backing from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital.

The departure was confirmed by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a note to staff, published on Google's blog alongside a separate message from Demis Hassabis announcing his own change in role. Pichai described Ghemawat and Dean as having helped drive some of the company's most significant technology shifts, "from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era." He added that it had been "a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay," and confirmed Google would stay involved "as a founding investor and Cloud partner" to Discovery Loop.

The exit lands alongside a broader reshuffle at Google DeepMind. Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day operations to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. In his own note, Hassabis said the moment called for him to "hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM" so he can focus on "the big picture" as AGI draws closer, adding that he has "total confidence" in Koray Kavukcuoglu, who steps up as SVP of Google DeepMind.

Pichai framed the changes as part of a broader push to keep Google "at the AI frontier" even as it hands more responsibility to a new generation of leaders.