Microsoft will bring GitHub into its CoreAI division with the announcement this morning that GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke will be stepping down as the leader of the widely used software development platform and code repository.
GitHub has operated largely on its own since its acquisition by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion. However, with the rise of the GitHub Copilot coding assistant and the broader growth of AI-powered software development, GitHub’s fortunes are increasingly tied to those of its parent company.
Dohmke said in a post Monday morning that he will remain with GitHub through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition before leaving to start a new company. He said his decision was driven by a desire to return to his startup roots after more than a decade at Microsoft and GitHub.
“With more than 1B repos and forks, and over 150 million developers, GitHub has never been stronger than it is today,” he wrote. “We have seen more open-source projects with more contributions every year. AI projects have doubled in the last year alone. And our presence in companies of any size is unmatched in the market.”
GitHub also faces pressure from AI-powered coding tools. In addition to the coding capabilities from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, tools like Cursor have seen meteoric growth, and Google’s Alphabet is pushing further into agentic coding with its recruitment of key leaders from AI code generation startup Windsurf.
Microsoft formed its CoreAI group in January to develop AI technologies and tools for the company and its customers. The group is led by Jay Parikh, the former global head of engineering at Facebook (now Meta), who joined Microsoft in October 2024.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year that GitHub Copilot had become a larger business on its own than all of GitHub was when Microsoft bought it.
According to Microsoft’s recent earnings call, GitHub Copilot now has 20 million users, and enterprise customers grew 75% quarter-over-quarter. Ninety percent of the Fortune 100 use the AI assistant, and AI projects on GitHub more than doubled over the past year, according to the company.
Announcing the acquisition in 2018, Microsoft promised that GitHub would “operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries.” We’ve asked Microsoft for more information on the new structure and what it means for GitHub’s operations, and we’ll update this post as we learn more.
Dohmke, who moved from Germany to the United States after selling his startup to Microsoft more than a decade ago, took over as GitHub CEO in 2021 after helping to lead the acquisition alongside Nat Friedman.
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