Urs Hölzle (German pronunciation: [ˈʊrs ˈhœltslɛ]; born 1964[1]) is a Swiss-American software engineer and technology executive.

[2] His most notable contributions include leading the development of fundamental cloud infrastructure such as energy-efficient data centers, distributed compute and storage systems, and software-defined networking.

[3][4] Before joining Google, Hölzle was an associate professor of computer science at University of California, Santa Barbara.

[2] While he led various areas during the early years of the company, including operations, search, and Gmail, he is best known for his work leading the infrastructure systems underpinning Google's applications, and for their focus on both efficiency and scalability.

[9] Now in its third edition, the book is the most downloaded textbook at Morgan Claypool[10] and is widely used in undergraduate and graduate Computer Science education.

For his contributions to the design, operation, and energy efficiency of large-scale data centers, Hölzle was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2013.

[17] The internal data flow, or network, is distinct from the one that connects users to Google services (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.).

Hölzle is credited with leading the creation of Google's internal cloud, including architecting clusters based on commodity servers,[19] distributed file systems,[20][21] cluster scheduling,[22] software defined networking,[23][24][25] hardware reliability,[26] processor design,[27][28] custom ASICs for AI (TPUs) and vide processing,[29] and many more.

For example, SP Global reports that the top hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft) accounted for over 40% of contracted capacity during 2017-22.

Hölzle has widely been credited for favoring market based approaches, discouraging proprietary paths that would only benefit Google.

[47] Hölzle became a Fulbright scholar in 1988 and was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 for contributions to the design, operation, and energy efficiency of large-scale data centers.

[2] For example, he is said to have instituted Google's practice of code reviews for every change, the culture of using blameless postmortems to learn from mistakes rather than find out whose fault it was,[51] and a focus on using technical interviews to identify the best candidates.