Google veteran steps down as manager in cloud shakeup

California: One of Google’s earliest employees will step back from an executive management role, having held a senior position at the company’s cloud unit.

Urs Hölzle joined the company, now the key unit of parent Alphabet, in 1999 as its eighth employee, and will now transition into a role as a Google Fellow, the company said.

In Google’s early years, Hölzle was instrumental in building the unique computing machinery that supported its major services, letting the company expand quickly from search into mapping, video and countless other fields. Eventually, Google would package that computing infrastructure as the core selling point of its cloud division. More recently, Hölzle led Google’s push into making its own chips for processing artificial intelligence, although the company has struggling to sell that hardware via cloud services.

Hölzle is one of the last remaining Google employees that worked closely with company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who stepped down from their roles in 2019. The founders remain majority shareholders.

CNBC earlier reported that Hölzle would become an “individual contributor” after more than two decades of leading technical teams, citing an internal email from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. The veteran will focus on articulating technical AI processes, facilitating discussions, and streamlining decision making, according to the memo.

Hölzle previously sparked internal controversy when he moved to New Zealand in 2021, after opposing remote working for other employees during the pandemic.

His new role adds to a series of changes at Google in recent weeks, including the departure of key artificial intelligence researcher Llion Jones. In April, Google consolidated its AI research groups into one unit, which shifted its longtime AI executive Jeff Dean into a new role as chief scientist.