Meta's head of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, is departing the company in early 2027 after nearly 18 years. David Brown, an Amazon Web Services senior vice president who joined Meta in July, will take over leadership of the social media giant's data center operations.
Janardhan announced his departure in an internal memo Wednesday. Brown will formally assume the role as Meta's chief of technical infrastructure, reporting to President Dina Powell McCormick and technical leader Daniel Gross under the Meta Compute program.
The leadership transition occurs as Meta projects full-year capital expenditures between $135 billion and $145 billion—a figure drawing intense investor scrutiny. In its third-quarter earnings, Meta also reported negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion, prompting S&P Global Ratings to downgrade the company's outlook from stable to negative in late October, citing elevated capex risk.
In his memo, Janardhan said the timing aligns with the company's need to make "the next set of choices about our priorities." He characterized Brown as someone with "the instincts, depth and judgment this moment requires," noting his career building infrastructure for demanding workloads. Brown will oversee Meta's expansion of data centers designed to support artificial intelligence training and inference at hyperscaler scale.
Janardhan will remain through the first quarter of 2027 to support the transition.
