Meta infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan will depart in early 2027, succeeded by David Brown, a former AWS senior vice president who joined the company in July, as Meta faces investor scrutiny over capital expenditure plans reaching up to $145 billion.
Meta's long-tenured infrastructure chief will exit the company in the new year, with a former Amazon Web Services senior vice president stepping in to oversee the social media giant's sprawling data center operations.
Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, announced his departure in an internal memo obtained by CNBC, saying "it's time to pass the baton" to David Brown, who joined Meta in July after serving as a senior vice president at AWS.
Janardhan, who has been with Meta since 2009, said he will remain through the first quarter of 2027 to assist with the transition. "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 wrote in the memo.
Brown will formally lead Meta's infrastructure efforts and also serve as chief technical officer of the Meta Compute initiative, a program spearheaded by the company's president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick and technical leader Daniel Gross.
In the memo, Janardhan offered a pointed endorsement of his successor. "Dave has spent his career building and operating dependable infrastructure for a wide range of demanding workloads," he wrote. "He has the instincts, depth and judgment this moment requires."
The transition reflects Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's push to expand Meta's data center capacity under newer leadership, coming at a moment of heightened scrutiny over capital expenditure levels across Meta and its hyperscaler peers.
Meta said during its third-quarter earnings report that it expects full-year capital expenditures to land between $135 billion and $145 billion. The company also reported negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion, a figure that factored into S&P Global Ratings' decision in late October to revise Meta's credit outlook from AA- stable to AA- negative.
Zuckerberg is relying on Brown and the broader Meta Compute leadership to continue building the data center and related infrastructure capacity needed to support the company's artificial intelligence ambitions, underscoring how central physical compute has become to Meta's long-term strategy.
Bloomberg News first reported on the executive transition.
Brown's background at AWS — one of the world's largest cloud infrastructure operators — positions him to navigate the technical and operational demands of a buildout at this scale, even as investors continue to press Meta and its rivals on the pace of spending. How Brown shapes infrastructure priorities in the months ahead will be a signal of where Zuckerberg sees the company's AI compute needs heading through the remainder of the decade.
Jay Goldberg is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering technology, markets, and policy. He files the breaking news and deal coverage that move the publication's core desks.
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