The Indian CEO powering America’s AI age

Hello and welcome to TOI Bharat Abroad.

Today’s edition is about the strange, stubborn and often spectacular journey of Indians abroad: from a Kanpur-born student denied a US visa three times to the Indian-origin CEO now steering a trillion-dollar American chip giant; from Washington’s latest attempt to make H-1B hiring more expensive; to a 14-year-old Indian-origin teenager turning the spelling bee into a theatre of memory, discipline and diaspora ambition.

It is, in many ways, the story of the Indian global arc: doors that do not open easily, systems that keep raising the bar, and a generation that keeps finding a way through.

Let’s go.

THE BIG STORY

From visa rejection to trillion-dollar America

In 1976, a Kanpur-born BITS Pilani student stood inside the US embassy in Delhi after being denied a student visa for the third time. His father refused to leave until someone explained why. Half a century later, that student, Sanjay Mehrotra, heads Micron Technology, the memory-chip giant that has crossed a $1 trillion market cap and entered the top tier of corporate America.

Why it matters:
Mehrotra’s rise captures the strange contradiction at the heart of modern America. Even as MAGA politics rails against immigration and globalisation, some of the companies most central to American technological power are run by Indian-born executives. Alongside Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Mehrotra now completes a remarkable Indian-origin triangle at the summit of US tech.

Driving the news:
Micron’s valuation surge has been fuelled by the AI boom, especially demand for high-bandwidth memory chips that power data centres. When Mehrotra took charge in 2017, Micron was worth roughly $20 billion. Today, it is a trillion-dollar firm, boosted by the realisation that AI may run on processors, but it remembers through memory.

The big picture:
Mehrotra’s story also links Silicon Valley to Sanand. Micron is investing over $800 million in an assembly, testing, marking and packaging facility in Gujarat, part of India’s larger semiconductor push. The symbolism is almost cinematic: the Indian student once denied entry into America is now helping shape America’s chip strategy with India. In the age of AI, the quiet engineer has replaced the swaggering founder as the figure who keeps the machine running.

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NRI WATCH

H-1B wage hike faces legal cloud

A proposed US Department of Labor rule to sharply raise wages for H-1B workers and employment-based immigrants has run into a familiar American problem: the courts may not like it.

The rule would raise prevailing wage requirements across all four H-1B wage levels, with increases ranging from roughly 21% to 33%. For employers, that could mean tens of thousands of dollars more per hire in major tech hubs. For Indian professionals, who remain among the biggest users of the H-1B route, it could make the American dream more expensive before it even begins.

The National Foundation for American Policy has argued that the proposal may violate US immigration law by turning prevailing wages into a wage premium, effectively pricing high-skilled foreign workers out of the labour market. Immigration lawyers told TOI that legal challenges are likely if the rule moves forward.

The policy fits a larger pattern. America still wants global talent, especially in technology, engineering and AI. But its politics increasingly wants to make that talent harder to hire, harder to sponsor and harder to justify. For Indian workers and students looking west, the message is clear: the door is open, but someone keeps raising the height of the step.

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OFFBEAT

Shrey Parikh spells his way to American glory

America’s most charming academic blood sport has once again produced an Indian-origin champion. Shrey Parikh, a 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, California, won the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee after a dramatic spell-off against Ishaan Gupta, a 12-year-old from Jersey City.

In the final 90-second sprint, Shrey correctly spelled 32 words, beating Ishaan’s 25 and setting a new spell-off record. It was the kind of finish that turns dictionaries into stadiums and children into gladiators armed with etymology.

His win also carried the arc of persistence. Shrey had finished 89th in 2022 and third in 2024 before finally taking the crown in Washington, DC. For the Indian diaspora, the spelling bee remains a strangely perfect theatre of immigrant aspiration: discipline, language, memory, parental anxiety and the quiet belief that even the most impossible word can be broken down, syllable by syllable.

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