It’s another round of headhunting, the sort Mark Zuckerberg is known to pull off.
According to The Wall Street Journal, David Brown, one of AWS’s most senior executives, is set to join Meta in the coming weeks.
This arrival signals Meta’s expanding ambitions in building datacenters and computing capacity.
With nearly two decades spent at the cloud services leader, David Brown’s mandate will be to steer the massive datacenter construction program Meta has undertaken. He will report to Santosh Janardhan, the group’s head of infrastructure.
David Brown had recently been overseeing AWS’s compute and machine learning services. He was especially part of the famed “S-team,” the tight-knit circle of 28 executives who advise Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Promoted to Senior Vice President in April, he was also one of AWS’s public faces, regularly delivering keynote addresses at the company’s large client summit in Las Vegas.
His departure after nineteen years has obviously not gone unnoticed within the company.
An AWS veteran at the helm of the infrastructure
In a note to the teams and relayed by Reuters, Matt Garman, AWS’s chief, asserted that the business and the teams had never been stronger.
This recruitment does not come out of nowhere. At Meta’s annual general meeting in May last year, Mark Zuckerberg signaled that the group could venture into cloud computing.
He explained that companies were approaching Meta almost every week to access its AI models or to pay to use its surplus computing capacity.
Meta said it had not yet taken the plunge, arguing that it was leveraging all of its computing power, but that it could become an option if the group judged it had “over-invested” in its infrastructure.
Meta plans to invest between $125 billion and $145 billion this year, a large portion of which is earmarked for building data centers dedicated to AI.
In January, Meta’s boss announced the launch of a flagship initiative named Meta Compute, charged with planning the construction of hundreds of gigawatts of computing capacity.
