🇮🇳 Arvind Krishna

Arvind Krishna was born in 1962 in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, the son of an Indian Army major general — Vinod Krishna — and a homemaker who taught herself accountancy after the family moved every two years on Army postings. He grew up in cantonments across India: Pune, Dehradun, Delhi. He was an unspectacular student in everything except mathematics, where his school principals reportedly stopped grading him because he kept finishing the year's textbook within the first month.

He went to the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for electrical engineering in 1980, then to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a PhD in electrical engineering, completed in 1990. His dissertation was on signal processing for satellite-based communications — work that became foundational to several IBM patents he would later file.

He joined IBM in 1990 at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He stayed at IBM for the next thirty-four years, an unusually monogamous American technology career. He worked first on cryptography and security, then on the WebSphere platform, then on databases, then on cloud architecture. He filed fifteen patents under his own name. He led IBM's $2 billion acquisition of Softlayer in 2013, which became the seed of IBM's cloud business.

His critical decade was the 2010s. As senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software, he had a direct view of IBM losing the public-cloud war to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Krishna's thesis — fought internally for years — was that IBM could not win the pure public-cloud race but could win the hybrid-cloud race: enterprises with on-premise legacy systems that needed a path to multi-cloud without rewriting everything. The vehicle, he argued, was open source. The vehicle was Red Hat.

He drove the Red Hat deal from his side. He flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, met with Red Hat's then-CEO Jim Whitehurst, structured the transaction, and pushed it through IBM's board against significant internal skepticism. The deal closed in July 2019. By January 2020, when Rometty announced she would step down, Krishna was the only logical successor. He took over on April 6, 2020 — three weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, with most IBM offices closed worldwide.

His CEO tenure has been almost entirely about executing the Red Hat thesis. He spun off the managed-infrastructure-services business as Kyndryl in November 2021 — a $19 billion spinoff that simplified IBM into hybrid cloud, AI, and consulting. He doubled down on Watsonx, IBM's enterprise AI platform built in part on top of open-source foundation models, positioning IBM as the AI vendor for regulated industries (banking, healthcare, government).

He has also become — with Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella — one of the three Indian-born CEOs running the largest American technology companies, a fact noted in nearly every Indian newspaper but rarely by Krishna himself. He has spoken publicly about ending the H-1B per-country cap and about a U.S. immigration backlog that he himself navigated for nearly a decade.

He lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, with his wife Amita Maddali (whom he met at IIT Kanpur) and their two children. He has continued to publish technical papers as IBM CEO — a rarity for any Fortune 100 chief. He returns to Guntur most years to visit his mother and to spend a week at the Krishna family farm, where, friends say, he reads physics textbooks the way other CEOs read airport thrillers.