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David Brown will also become CTO of Meta Compute. The handover comes as Meta forecasts $135 billion to $145 billion in annual capital spending.
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The handoff puts a recently hired cloud-infrastructure executive in charge of the technical operations supporting Meta’s AI buildout, including its Meta Compute initiative. David Brown will take over as Santosh Janardhan prepares to depart in 2027, with Janardhan staying on to support the transition through the first quarter. Brown’s remit comes as Meta makes major infrastructure investments; the company has not disclosed a reason for Janardhan’s departure, making execution under the new leadership a key watchpoint.
Janardhan told staff about his departure in an internal memo on November 11; Bloomberg reported that he gave no reason for leaving.
Brown joined Meta in July after serving as a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services.
Meta’s third-quarter earnings report projected full-year capital expenditure of $135 billion to $145 billion, amid investor scrutiny of spending.
Meta is handing its infrastructure operation to a recent recruit from Amazon Web Services as longtime chief Santosh Janardhan prepares to leave in 2027. David Brown will succeed him and become chief technical officer of Meta Compute, putting him in charge of the technical infrastructure needed to support the company’s AI ambitions.
Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, told staff about his departure in an internal memo on November 11. Bloomberg News first reported the transition; CNBC also obtained the memo. Janardhan joined the company in 2009, when it was still called Facebook.
His successor arrived much more recently. Brown, a former AWS senior vice president, joined Meta in July. Janardhan said he would help support Brown through the first quarter of 2027 as part of the transition, giving the incoming leader an overlap with the executive who has run the organization.
Janardhan did not give a reason for leaving in the memo, according to Bloomberg. He framed the timing around the infrastructure organization’s next decisions and praised Brown’s experience building and operating dependable systems for demanding workloads.
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.
Santosh Janardhan, in an internal memo obtained by CNBC
Brown’s assignment combines leadership of Meta’s infrastructure efforts with a technical role in Meta Compute. That initiative is spearheaded by Meta president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick and technical leader Daniel Gross. Brown will serve as its CTO while overseeing the company’s wider infrastructure work.
The work concerns the data centers and related infrastructure that support Meta’s AI ambitions. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is relying on the newer leaders to continue developing that capacity, according to CNBC. The succession therefore puts Brown in charge of the technical operations behind a major investment program.
In its third-quarter earnings report, Meta said it expected full-year capital expenditure of $135 billion to $145 billion. That forecast sets the scale of the company’s spending as responsibility changes hands. CNBC described the transition as coming amid increasing investor scrutiny of capital spending at Meta and its large technology rivals.
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