Santosh Janardhan, who has run Meta's infrastructure for years, will step down in early 2027, Bloomberg reported. Dave Brown, who joined Meta from Amazon Web Services (AWS, Amazon's cloud business) this year, will take over.
Janardhan is Meta's head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering. Brown's arrival in 2026 means the successor was in the building well before the departure date. The change lands while Meta spends up to $145B this year, mostly on AI.
That figure explains why this job has changed. Infrastructure here means the data centers, servers and networks that run Meta's apps and train its AI models. At a budget this size, the person in charge is answerable for turning an enormous sum into working capacity, not just for keeping services online.
Brown's résumé fits that framing in one respect. AWS is the largest seller of cloud computing, so he comes from a business built around running infrastructure at very large scale. The difference is that AWS builds capacity to rent to customers, while Meta builds it for its own products and its own AI work. How much that experience carries over is a judgment, not something the facts so far settle.
Meta is not alone in spending heavily. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are all putting large sums into AI capacity, and the executives who oversee that spending now carry some of the most consequential jobs in these companies. Investors tend to hold such budgets against the revenue AI brings in. Whoever runs Meta's infrastructure after early 2027 will inherit a spending level that invites exactly that comparison.