Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley’s development of cloud computing.
Barroso, a 22-year veteran of Google who unexpectedly died on September 16 at age 59, built his data centers with low-cost components instead of expensive specialized hardware. He reimagined how they worked together to develop the concept of “the data center as a computer,” which now underpins the web, mobile apps, and other internet services.
Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of Google’s infrastructure organization, says Barroso left an indelible imprint at the company whose contributions to the industry are countless. “We lost a beloved friend, colleague and respected leader,” she writes in a statement on behalf of the company.
Barroso continued to lead major projects at Google, including development of its Covid exposure notifications app, for which he served as a mediator across teams within the company and with outside partners. In an email Fitzpatrick sent to Google staff seen by WIRED, she wrote that it’s understood Barroso died from natural causes.
Fitzpatrick says Barroso’s family, which includes his wife Catherine Warner, a singer for whom he sometimes played guitar, is seeking privacy. The cause of death could take weeks to determine, according to the medical examiner’s office of Santa Clara County, in Silicon Valley.
Barroso had wanted to be an electrical engineer since his childhood days in Brazil, where he got into amateur radio with his grandfather and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He came to the US for a doctorate in computer architecture from the University of Southern California and worked on chips at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation. But he came to Google in 2001 wanting to focus on software engineering.
Barroso wasn’t a coder for long—the then small startup’s few employees had to pitch in wherever help was needed. Three years after joining Google, Urs Hölzle, the company’s first vice president of engineering, tasked Barroso with rebuilding the company’s infrastructure. “I was the closest thing we had to a hardware person,” Barroso recalled to WIRED in 2012.
When he took on the infrastructure gig, internet businesses such as Google typically hosted their websites on servers in data centers maintained by another company. But these vendors couldn’t handle the surging search startup’s growing needs.
Barroso’s inexperience in data center design helped lead him to reinventing it, he wrote in an essay and recalled during a podcast in 2021. He found himself asking “Wait, wait, wait, but why are we doing it this way?” Barroso said on the podcast. “And it just turns out that the people who had been living in that area hadn’t really thought about questioning that. And sometimes it’s something that was based on a good reason three years ago, and that reason had a sell-by date, and it’s time to do something else.”
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