Meet Jayshree Ullal, Indian-origin CEO with net worth $5.7 billion, who has overtaken Pichai, Nadella

For years, the conversation about wealth among Indian-origin tech leaders has centred on familiar names at the helm of global consumer giants. That hierarchy has now shifted. The latest Hurun India Rich List 2025 reveals a quieter yet decisive shift at the top, driven not by search engines or software suites, but by the backbone of the cloud and AI economy.

According to the Hurun India Rich List 2025, Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO of Arista Networks, has emerged as the wealthiest Indian-origin executive globally, overtaking Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft.

Hurun India said Ullal now leads the list of Indian-origin executives in the technology space, based on her net worth and long-term value creation, a notable shift at a time when public attention has largely stayed focused on leaders of consumer-facing tech giants.

Who is Ullal?

Ullal, an Indian-origin, British-born executive, has been at the helm of Arista Networks for the past 17 years and is based in Santa Clara, California, where the company is headquartered. Arista operates in cloud networking, designing high-speed switches and software used by hyperscale data centres, cloud service providers and large enterprises.

Earlier this year, the 63-year-old CEO was ranked second among the top five first-generation women wealth creators in the Candere Hurun India Women Leaders List. Her rise has largely stayed away from the spotlight, even as Arista grew into a key enabler of global cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Ullal completed her schooling at the Convent of Jesus & Mary in New Delhi before moving to the United States. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from San Francisco State University, followed by a Master of Science in Engineering Management from Santa Clara University in 1986. In 2025, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering.

She joined Arista Networks in September 2008 and has continued as its CEO since then, steering the company towards software-driven networking well before cloud computing became mainstream. Prior to joining Arista, Ullal held senior roles at Cisco Systems, where she played a key role in building its switching business. She also worked at Advanced Micro Devices and Fairchild Semiconductor earlier in her career.

According to Forbes data dated December 27, 2025, Ullal’s net worth stands at $5.7 billion, following a recent increase of $34 million, which places her at number 713 on the global rich list. In comparison, Nadella’s net worth stood at $1.1 billion after a marginal decline, while Pichai’s wealth was estimated at $1.5 billion, following a $2 billion drop during the same period.

A major driver of Ullal’s wealth is her close to 3% stake in Arista Networks, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The value of her holdings has climbed sharply since 2020, fuelled by surging demand for cloud services, data centres and AI-related infrastructure. As enterprises rush to scale AI workloads, Arista’s networking products have become crucial, enabling steady and sustained growth.