Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta Platforms Inc., speaks at the Arm Everywhere event on Tuesday, March 24, 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta’s longtime infrastructure leader will leave the company in the new year, leaving a recently hired former Amazon Web Services executive poised to oversee technology operations at the large data center.
Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, announced his planned retirement on Wednesday in an internal memo obtained by CNBC. Janardhan, who has worked at Meta since 2009, said it was “time to pass the baton” to former AWS senior vice president David Brown, who joined Meta from AWS in July.
The executive changes underscore efforts by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to expand the company’s data center business under new leadership, amid increased investor scrutiny of capital spending by the social media giant and rival hyperscalers.
Brown will now officially lead Meta’s infrastructure efforts and serve as chief technology officer for the Meta computing initiative, led by President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and Technology Lead Daniel Gross. Zuckerberg is relying on these new executives to continue developing the state-of-the-art data centers and related infrastructure needed to support his AI ambitions.
In its recent third-quarter earnings report, the company said it expects full-year capital spending to fall in the range of $135 billion to $145 billion. Meta also recorded negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion, which S&P Global Ratings noted in late October as part of its decision to revise Meta’s credit rating from AA stable to AA negative.
Janardhan said in the memo that he will help support Brown through the first quarter of 2027 as part of the “transition.”
“This is the perfect time for Dave to take the lead in shaping our efforts as we make our next choices about priorities,” Janardhan said in the memo. “Dave has spent his career building and operating reliable infrastructure for a wide range of demanding workloads. He has the intuition, depth and judgment needed in this moment.”
Bloomberg News first reported the management changes.
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