Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed his fondness for South India during a conversation with Google CEO Sundar Pichai at Dreamforce 2025 conference in San Francisco on October 17.
"You're from my favorite part of India, the south. Everybody knows I love a good masala dosa," Benioff said, to which Pichai replied, "That makes two of us."
Benioff also said that one thing he loves about the South is that women are in charge of the household. "The mothers are in charge and the gurus are the women," he said.
The Salesforce chief also spoke about a guru in Kerala's Trivandrum who had a "huge impact on my life," likely referring to Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.
Benioff has often spoken about how meeting her in the late 1990s during a trip to Kerala profoundly influenced his life and the founding philosophy of Salesforce. He had said that philanthropy became a central part of his life after that meeting.
Pichai, who was born in Tamil Nadu's Madurai in 1972, said that South India is a "special place" and credited his love for reading to his mother and his granddad.
"She used to be a voracious reader. Because of financial circumstances, she never went past high school, but she still read a lot. That is where my love of learning and knowledge came from," he said.
"Growing up there, obviously strong family values, extraordinary focus on learning and knowledge and acquiring wisdom over the years. And it's not an accident, it led me to Google over time, given what our mission is and so on," Pichai added.
However, he recalled he had to wait a long time to get access to every piece of technology.
“That’s what reinforced to me that we are all in a world where we are trying to give people access to technology, and you see the step change that comes with it. It’s a journey, and with AI, I think we have the chance to take a bigger step,” Pichai said.
Pichai also talked about Google’s recent $15 billion investment in India to set up the company's first AI hub in Andhra Pradesh’s Visakhapatnam.
He noted that it was Google's largest-ever AI investment outside the United States.
“I used to take this train through south India and there's this town called Vizag. It's a beautiful coastal town that's growing up. The chance to transform a region like that through this kind of investment really meant a lot,” Pichai said.
He also mentioned that he called Prime Minister Narendra Modi last Sunday night (October 12) to share the company's plans to set up the AI hub, which combines a gigawatt-scale data centre operations, a new international subsea gateway, and large-scale energy infrastructure.
80 percent of the data centre will be powered by clean energy, Pichai said.
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