Meta’s infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan to step down in 2027

Former AWS executive Dave Brown will take over Meta's data centres as AI spending soars.


Meta’s infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan to step down in 2027
Image Credits Credit: Woliul Hasan on Unsplash

Santosh Janardhan, who has run Meta’s infrastructure for years, will step down in early 2027, Bloomberg reported. Dave Brown, who joined from AWS this year, will take over as Meta spends up to $145B this year, mostly on AI.

Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, will step down from running the infrastructure team in early 2027, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo. He gave no reason in the memo.

Dave Brown will take over. He joined Meta this year after nearly two decades at Amazon Web Services, where he oversaw computing and machine learning services. Janardhan will stay through the first quarter to help with the handover, and will then advise as chief technology officer of Meta Compute.

Janardhan joined Facebook in 2009 and helped build the data centres, networks and custom chips that now serve billions of people. In January, he became co-lead of Meta Compute, a new group planning how Meta secures computing power for AI, alongside president Dina Powell McCormick and Daniel Gross.

“You’ve positioned the team and Meta well for this moment, and you’ve built a strong team that can carry this work forward,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote to Janardhan.

The change comes as Meta spends heavily on AI. It expects capital spending of up to $145B this year and has about $825B in future commitments, mostly for data centres and cloud computing. It has also explored renting out spare compute, and was in talks to lease $10B to Anthropic.

It is the second senior Meta departure planned for 2027. Policy chief Joel Kaplan is also leaving, with Powell McCormick picking up some of his work.

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