Bengaluru: Sanjay Ghemawat spent nearly three decades at Google building technology that most users never saw but billions relied on every day.The Kota-raised computer scientist helped create the systems that enabled Google to store vast amounts of data, process enormous computing workloads and keep its services running as the company evolved from a fledgling search engine into a global technology giant.Ghemawat has now left Google to co-found Discovery Loop, an artificial intelligence startup, with longtime collaborator Jeff Dean and AI researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le.The public benefit corporation aims to use AI to automate parts of machine learning, science and engineering, with the goal of accelerating scientific discovery. Google will back the venture as a founding investor and cloud partner, while collaborating on machine learning systems and infrastructure research.Born in West Lafayette, Indiana, Ghemawat grew up in Kota, Rajasthan. He studied computer science at Cornell University before earning a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995.Before joining Google in 1999, he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center, where he began a long-running collaboration with Dean.At Google, Ghemawat became one of the principal architects of the company’s computing infrastructure. He co-authored the landmark Google File System (GFS), which enabled data to be stored reliably across large clusters of commodity computers, ensuring services remained available even when individual machines failed.He and Dean later developed MapReduce, a programming model that split massive computing jobs across thousands of machines before combining the results. The technology underpinned Google’s rapid growth and laid the foundation for much of today’s big data ecosystem.Ghemawat also played a key role in developing Bigtable, Google’s distributed database for large-scale structured data, and Spanner, its globally distributed database. More recently, he contributed to TensorFlow and Pathways, technologies used to build and run large AI models.Ghemawat and Dean received the ACM Prize in Computing in 2012 for their pioneering work on large-scale distributed systems. Ghemawat was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2009.Discovery Loop has already attracted high-profile backing. Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla said he is investing in the company.“Could be larger than the impact that Google had when we backed them in 1998 at Kleiner,” Khosla wrote on X, referring to venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he was then a partner.
