Indian engineers spent years chasing Silicon Valley. Now some say, ‘I would not come to the U.S.’

In the heart of Silicon Valley, for a sunny week in April, Indian tech workers, founders and executives from some of the hottest Bay Area startups gathered around pitch decks and crowded into lecture halls for keynote speeches on AI and data centers.

Ammineni had arrived in the Bay Area a few weeks before, carrying with him the same aspirations as many of the C-suite types who were onstage at The Indus Entrepreneurs conference, or TiEcon, an annual gathering that serves as a reminder of how deeply embedded Indian Americans are in Silicon Valley’s power structure.

Once a small group of engineers arriving on student visas and work permits, Indians now occupy key roles across the startup ecosystem, from founders to funders, and are among the most visible and influential groups in the tech industry, rising to top leadership at the likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe. A Chronicle analysis also shows that they constitute about 15% of executives at the largest companies and nearly a third of all founders in the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator…