Meta Loses Longtime Infrastructure Chief Santosh Janardhan

Meta is losing the engineer who spent 16 years building the infrastructure behind its social media empire. Santosh Janardhan, the company's longtime head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, will step down next year, Meta confirmed to TechCrunch. His replacement is Dave Brown, who joined Meta as vice president of infrastructure earlier this year after 19 years at Amazon, where he worked on compute, cloud and AI, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The handover is already in motion. "Santosh will stay on for transition and he is moving into an advisory role on Meta Compute," a Meta representative said. Bloomberg first reported the departure, citing an internal memo circulated recently at the company.

Who is leaving, and why now?

Janardhan joined Meta in 2009, when the company was still called Facebook and ran a fraction of the computing footprint it operates today. Over the following decade and a half, he helped scale the firm from a fast-growing social network into one of the largest internet presences in the world — the systems that serve billions of users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The reason for his exit remains unclear. The internal memo did not specify why he is stepping down, and Meta did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. Janardhan's own memo, however, reportedly cited the need to "pass the baton" — language that suggests a planned succession rather than a sudden rupture.

In plain terms: the person who ran Meta's physical and technical backbone for years has decided it is time for someone else to carry it forward.

What does the change mean for Meta Compute?

The timing matters. Earlier this year, Meta handed Janardhan leadership of Meta Compute, an initiative to scale the company's data center investments and strategy. That assignment reflects how sharply the ground has shifted under infrastructure teams across the industry: Meta's spending on compute has exploded in recent years as it races to keep pace with rivals in artificial intelligence.

Whoever runs that effort now controls one of the largest capital budgets in technology. Data centers, GPU fleets and power capacity have become the currency of the AI race, and Meta has been pouring money into all three.

Brown arrives with directly relevant experience. Nearly two decades at Amazon — a company that built one of the world's dominant cloud businesses — covered compute, cloud and AI, the exact domains Meta is now investing in at record scale. His appointment signals continuity rather than a strategic pivot: an operations veteran stepping into a role where execution, not reinvention, is the priority.

Janardhan will not disappear immediately. He remains at Meta through the transition period and is expected to leave sometime next year, holding an advisory position on Meta Compute in the interim.

For enterprise watchers, the lesson is straightforward: in the AI era, infrastructure leadership changes at hyperscale companies are succession events worth tracking, because the people in those seats decide how hundreds of millions of dollars in compute capacity get deployed.