Once the Paris Olympics ended, I turned my attention to the list of sports in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

It included cricket. I am a passive cricket enthusiast, but I also thought, “Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and Shantanu Narayen will be excited.”

CEOs of the top cloud firms – which are building some of the world’s fastest computers — are big fans of cricket. Nadella and Narayen have invested in Major League Cricket, a pro league in the U.S. for the sport.

Pichai also sent a message to a version of the Cricket World Cup in the U.S. earlier this year.

Cricket isn’t a popular sport in the US but well-established in India. The sport’s popularity in England and Australia is dwindling, but the involvement of Google’s and Microsoft’s CEOs is sparking some interest in the sport.

Legendary GPU maker Raja Koduri is also a cricket enthusiast, congratulating the Indian team after winning the World Cup.

Cricket and HPC

There’s no direct relation between cricket and supercomputing, but High-Performance Computing (HPC) folks may start hearing about cricket as the tech CEOs spread the word about it heading into the Olympics.

Cricket is perhaps the best conversation starter if meeting Indian talent employed by the industry.

The U.S. cricket team members are mostly immigrants, many of them engineers, doctors, and STEM enthusiasts. Most of the team members have full-time jobs and play cricket in their spare time.

The U.S. team — with many players from the Bay Area — did surprisingly well at the World Cup, beating Pakistan and pushing India to the brink.

One of the top players for the U.S. team, Saurabh Netravalkar, captured the imagination of South Asians. Netravalkar is a full-time AI engineer at Oracle by day and plays cricket in his spare time. He played professional cricket in India before giving up his sports dreams to immigrate to the U.S. He attained a Master’s in Computer Science at Cornell University.

Tech Money from Cricket Fans

Tech money dominates U.S. cricket, with six teams playing in Major League Cricket.

Nadella is an owner of Major League Cricket alongside Adobe CEO Narayen and Indian entrepreneur Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

Nadella is also part owner of the Seattle Orcas cricket team, alongside other partners who are all Indian-origin tech company owners and venture capitalists.

The development of Cricket infrastructure could attract India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, to expand his operations in the U.S.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who owns major telecom and tech infrastructure, is a part owner of the New York cricket team. Ambani spent $600 million on his son’s wedding last month, but Pichai, Bill Gates, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended the pre-party in February.

Nvidia has partnered with Ambani’s company, Reliance, to provide its Indian telecom customers access to its GPUs and servers for AI applications. Ambani is also building giant data centers that will likely host Nvidia GPUs and servers.

Olympics

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dreamed of being a team owner, and he got the LA Clippers. Cricket won’t get many eyeballs, but Nadella will follow in Ballmer’s footsteps.

There has been no official explanation for why cricket is being included in the 2028 Olympics, but it may be a play to attract tech companies. Nadella and Narayen, as cricket’s representatives, may play a role in the inclusion.

No plans have been shared yet, but a game may be played in the Bay Area, which has a large Indian diaspora.