Meta Platforms said on Wednesday that its longtime head of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, will leave the role early next year, a significant leadership change at the heart of the company's vast spending on artificial intelligence.
Janardhan, who is also co-head of engineering, joined Facebook in October 2009 and has overseen the infrastructure that powers Meta's apps and its growing fleet of data centers. He did not detail reasons for his departure in a memo to staff, Bloomberg News reported.
Dave Brown, who joined Meta earlier this year as vice president of infrastructure after nearly two decades at Amazon Web Services, will succeed him, Meta said. At Amazon, Brown oversaw computing and machine learning services.
Janardhan will remain at Meta through the first quarter of 2027 to support the transition, and will then serve as chief technology officer of Meta Compute, advising on technical direction and working with partners. Meta Compute is the group formed in January to plan how Meta secures the computing power behind its AI ambitions, alongside president Dina Powell McCormick and Daniel Gross.
The change lands as Meta pours record sums into data centers, chips and computing capacity, and as it builds out custom silicon to reduce its reliance on outside suppliers. The infrastructure chief's job — deciding what gets built, where, and on whose hardware — has become one of the most consequential roles in the company.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment beyond confirming the change, and Janardhan's memo gave no indication of what he plans to do next.
