Top CEOs in IT: Who Runs 10 Major Tech Companies Right Now

The top CEOs in IT covered in this guide are Jensen Huang (Nvidia), John Ternus (Apple), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Andy Jassy (Amazon), C.C. Wei (TSMC), Hock Tan (Broadcom), Lisa Su (AMD), Chuck Robbins (Cisco) and Christian Klein (SAP). Each one held the chief executive title on October 26, 2026, according to a leadership or investor page published by the company itself, and each profile below covers the year they took over, the career that led there and one decision the company has documented in its own releases.

This is a reference list, not an official ranking. Nobody paid to appear, and the numbering simply follows company size on the day we checked.

How these ten were picked

People lists about the top CEOs in IT tend to mix influence, fame and opinion. We used a narrower test so that anyone can repeat it:

1. Company size by market value. The starting point was the companiesmarketcap.com list of tech companies ranked by market cap, read on October 26, 2026. We worked down from position 1.
2. Computing is the main business. We kept makers of chips, devices, software, cloud services and networks. Tesla, SpaceX, Meta and Tencent were skipped because their core products are cars, rockets, social apps or games. Alphabet and Amazon stay in because Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services sit at the center of how their own pages describe these leaders.
3. One person holds the title. Oracle’s executive page lists two people as Chief Executive Officer, Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, so Oracle is out of a list built around single leaders.
4. No more than four chip companies. Chipmakers fill much of the list’s upper half. We kept the first four companies on the list whose main business is logic, processor or accelerator chips: Nvidia (No. 1), TSMC (No. 6), Broadcom (No. 9) and AMD (No. 13). Memory chipmakers Samsung (No. 11) and Micron (No. 12) rank above AMD and were left out by that choice. SK Hynix, ASML, Intel and CXMT (Nos. 14, 15, 17 and 18) rank below AMD, so they fell outside the four places.
5. Two remaining places by segment. We gave one place to a networking company (Cisco, No. 20 on the list) and one to a maker of enterprise business applications (SAP, No. 26). Palantir (No. 16) sits above Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks, Applied Materials, Dell and Lam Research (Nos. 22 to 25) sit between Cisco and SAP. Those five are not here because the last two places were filled by segment rather than by rank, so Palantir, the next company in line after AMD under rules 2 to 4, was passed over.
6. Role confirmed on the company’s own site. Every title and start date below comes from the company’s leadership page, investor relations page, newsroom or a securities filing.

We left out net worth, pay, family details and anything a company does not publish about its own chief executive.

The ten CEOs at a glance

Market values move every trading day, so treat that column as a snapshot from the date above.

1. Jensen Huang, Nvidia

CEO since: 1993. Nvidia’s newsroom bio says Huang has served as president, chief executive officer and a board member since the company began, a tenure far longer than any other on this list.

Background: Before Nvidia he worked at LSI Logic and at AMD. He holds a BSEE from Oregon State University and an MSEE from Stanford University.

Notable decisions: Nvidia’s corporate timeline marks 1999 as the year the company invented the GPU and 2006 as the year it opened GPU parallel processing to science and research with the CUDA architecture. Under the same leader for more than three decades, the company moved from graphics cards for games toward accelerated computing for data centers. For the story of how Nvidia started and who started it with him, see our companion piece on founders in IT.

2. John Ternus, Apple

CEO since: September 1, 2026. Apple announced on April 20, 2026 that Tim Cook would become executive chairman and that Ternus, then senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, would take over as chief executive on that date. His leadership page now lists him as CEO and a member of the board.

Background: Ternus joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, became a vice president of Hardware Engineering in 2013 and joined the executive team in 2021 as senior vice president. Earlier he was a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Notable decisions: He has run the company for less than two months, so his record so far is an engineering one. Apple credits him with hardware work on the introduction of iPad and AirPods, a recycled aluminum compound now used across several product lines, 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and repairability changes that extended the life spans of several products.

3. Satya Nadella, Microsoft

CEO since: February 2014. Microsoft’s executive page lists him as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Background: Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992. Before the CEO role he was executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise group, and earlier he ran research and development for Online Services and served as a vice president in the Microsoft Business Division. Before Microsoft he was on the technology staff at Sun Microsystems. He studied electrical engineering at Mangalore University, computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and business at the University of Chicago.

Notable decisions: On June 4, 2018, Microsoft agreed to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion, bringing the code hosting service used by developers into Microsoft.

4. Sundar Pichai, Alphabet

CEO since: December 2019 for Alphabet; August 2015 for Google. His author page on the Google blog describes him as CEO of Google and Alphabet.

Background: According to Alphabet’s December 2019 announcement, Pichai joined Google in 2004, helped lead Google Toolbar and then Google Chrome, and in 2014 took charge of product and engineering across Google’s products and platforms. He joined Alphabet’s board in July 2017. He studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, holds a master’s degree from Stanford and an MBA from the Wharton School.

Notable decisions: The same release says Google under his leadership invested in Google Cloud and YouTube and kept building on machine learning and quantum computing. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from executive roles in 2019, Pichai took on the Alphabet job as well, so one person now runs both the parent and its main operating company.

5. Andy Jassy, Amazon

CEO since: July 5, 2021, the date given in Amazon’s Form 8-K filed with the SEC. Amazon’s investor relations page lists him as President and CEO and a board member.

Background: Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and held roles across consumer and business units before founding Amazon Web Services. He led AWS from its inception and was its CEO from April 2016 until July 2021. He holds an AB from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Notable decisions: The decision that defines his career, by Amazon’s own account, is building AWS. Amazon presents him first as the founder of its cloud unit, and that cloud business is the main reason a retailer appears in a list of IT leaders at all.

6. C.C. Wei, TSMC

CEO since: June 2018. TSMC’s executive page says he was chief executive from June 2018 to June 2024, when the board elected him Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Background: Wei joined TSMC in 1998. He was President and Co-CEO from November 2013 to June 2018 and Co-Chief Operating Officer from March 2012. Before TSMC he worked at Chartered Semiconductor, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments. He has a B.S. in electrical engineering from National Chiao Tung University and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Notable decisions: On March 4, 2025, TSMC said it intends to add $100 billion to its plans for the United States, taking the total to US$165 billion. The expansion covers three new fabs, two advanced packaging facilities and an R&D center.

7. Hock Tan, Broadcom

CEO since: March 2006. Broadcom’s executive page lists him as President, Chief Executive Officer and Director.

Background: From 2005 to 2008 Tan chaired Integrated Device Technology, and from 1999 to 2005 he was President and CEO of Integrated Circuit Systems. Earlier roles include vice president of finance at Commodore International, senior posts at PepsiCo and General Motors, and managing director positions at Pacven Investment in Singapore and Hume Industries in Malaysia.

Notable decisions: In a post dated November 21, 2023, Tan announced that Broadcom had completed its acquisition of VMware. He wrote that the company would center its investment on VMware Cloud Foundation, the software stack for private and hybrid clouds.

8. Lisa Su, AMD

CEO since: October 8, 2014, when AMD’s board appointed her president and chief executive officer, effective immediately. AMD’s leadership page now lists her as Chair and Chief Executive Officer.

Background: Su joined AMD in January 2012 as senior vice president and general manager of its global business units. Before that she was a senior vice president at Freescale Semiconductor, and she spent 13 years at IBM in engineering and business roles, including running its Semiconductor Research and Development Center.

Notable decisions: On February 14, 2022, AMD completed its all-stock acquisition of Xilinx, first announced on October 27, 2020. The deal added FPGAs and adaptive SoCs to a business built on CPUs and GPUs.

9. Chuck Robbins, Cisco

CEO since: July 2015. Cisco’s newsroom bio says he was named CEO in July 2015 and elected Chair of the Board on December 11, 2017.

Background: The bio credits him with more than 25 years at Cisco, where he led global sales before taking the CEO role. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with a concentration in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Notable decisions: On March 18, 2024, Cisco completed its acquisition of Splunk, adding security and observability software to a company long known for routers and switches.

10. Christian Klein, SAP

CEO since: October 11, 2019, as Co-CEO alongside Jennifer Morgan, and as sole CEO since April 20, 2020. SAP’s leadership page lists him as Chief Executive Officer and chairman of the Executive Board.

Background: Klein started at SAP in 1999 as a student. He later served as CFO of SAP SuccessFactors and as SAP’s Chief Controlling Officer, became Chief Operating Officer in 2016 and joined the Executive Board in 2018. He holds a diploma in International Business Administration from the University of Cooperative Education in Mannheim.

Notable decisions: On January 27, 2021, SAP introduced RISE with SAP, an offer that packages the move of a customer’s business processes to the cloud. The SAP News report (in German) says Klein presented the offer at the unveiling event with guests from Microsoft, Siemens and LiveKindly, and that SAP also announced plans for a strategic acquisition in business process intelligence.

What these leaders have in common

A few patterns stand out once the ten profiles sit side by side:

• Eight of ten came up inside. Eight of the ten were long-time employees before they ran the company. Ternus, Nadella, Pichai, Jassy, Wei, Su, Robbins and Klein all spent years in engineering, product, sales or operations roles at the same firm. Huang founded his company, and Tan is the one clear outside hire.
• Engineering degrees dominate. Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, mathematics and computer science appear again and again in the backgrounds above.
• Acquisitions mark the eras. GitHub, VMware, Xilinx and Splunk each changed what the buyer sells, not just how much.
• CEO succession differs in timing. Apple announced its change on April 20, 2026, and Ternus took over on September 1, 2026, with Cook moving to executive chairman. Alphabet’s December 3, 2019 change took effect the same day it was announced, and Page and Brin stayed on as board members.

Tech company CEOs are also visible in a way many executives are not. Their names show up on earnings calls, keynotes and filings, so their decisions are easier to trace than those of leaders at private firms.

Using this list for research

If you study IT companies for investment, partnerships or sales, the chief executive is only the first name on a long chart. The piece on mapping budget owners, find decision makers, looks at the people under the chief executive who sign off on specific products, and our article on B2B email list building explains how teams organize that research. Plans for Email Finder Online are described on its pricing page.

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