Meta Platforms’ longtime infrastructure head will leave the company in early 2027. Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, told the company’s employees that he would step down from leading the infrastructure organization, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. He did not detail the reasons for his departure in the message.Janardhan, who has worked at Meta since 2009, said “it’s time to pass the baton” to former AWS senior vice president David Brown, who joined Meta in July from AWS. Janardhan said in the memo that he will help support Brown through the first quarter of 2027 as part of “the transition.” He wrote, “As we make the next set of choices about our priorities, this is the right time for Dave to take the lead in shaping that work.” Janardhan added in the memo, “Dave has spent his career building and operating dependable infrastructure for a wide range of demanding workloads. He has the instincts, depth and judgment this moment requires.”The announcement means that Brown will now formally lead Meta’s infrastructure efforts and serve as chief technical officer of the Meta Compute initiative, which is spearheaded by the company’s president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick and technical leader Daniel Gross.
A long-time Amazon’s cloud unit executive, Dave Brown joined Meta in July 2026
Dave Brown joined Meta in July 2026. Previously, he was senior vice president in Amazon Web Services. Brown joined AWS in its initial days and was a member of the early team that assembled its core EC2 service in South Africa in the 2000s. EC2, one of AWS’ oldest services, provides virtual slices of physical servers for rent, billed by the second, that companies use to run applications and websites. He was also part of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s S-team. Jassy’s S-team is reported to be a highly influential group of 28 executives with whom CEO Jassy meets regularly to make key business decisions.According to analysts, the change of guard underscores Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to expand the company’s data center operations under newer leaders at a time of increasing investor scrutiny on capital expenditure spending by the social media giant and its hyperscaler rivals.This major leadership change comes as Meta continues to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and the data centers needed to support it.During its third quarter earnings report, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said, “We hit major milestones this quarter toward delivering personal superintelligence for everyone – including launching Muse and Muse Wonder, our first frontier model.” It added that it expects full-year capex to fall in the range of $135 billion to $145 billion. Meta also logged negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion, which S&P Global Ratings noted as part of its decision in late October to revise Meta’s credit rating from AA- stable to AA- negative.
