Meta's infrastructure chief steps down amid massive AI spending push; AWS veteran to take over

The executive overseeing AI and data center infrastructure at Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is stepping down.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday (local time), citing an internal memo it obtained, that Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, has told the company he intends to resign.

Janardhan joined Facebook in 2009 and has been with the company for 17 years.

In the internal memo, he said his departure came because "the scale, complexity and criticality of the infrastructure grew beyond what I had imagined," adding that "it's time to pass the baton."

Janardhan did not disclose future plans.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanked Janardhan, saying he "set Meta up well for a moment like this and built a strong team that can lead this work forward."

Dave Brown, vice president of infrastructure, has been named as Janardhan's successor. Brown spent roughly 20 years at Amazon Web Services working on compute and machine learning services before joining Meta earlier this year. Janardhan said Brown "has the intuition, depth and judgment that we need right now."

Janardhan is expected to remain at the company through the first quarter of next year to assist with the transition.

The leadership change in Meta's infrastructure division comes as investor concerns over capital expenditure have grown amid an intensifying race to build out data centers. Meta recently raised the upper end of its capital expenditure outlook for this year to $145 billion and posted a free cash flow deficit of $2.12 billion.

In response, S&P Global Ratings kept Meta's credit rating at AA- but revised its outlook from stable to negative.