Meta's Infrastructure Chief Santosh Janardhan Is Stepping Down

Santosh Janardhan, Meta's longtime head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, is stepping down — and an Amazon veteran who joined the company only months ago will take his place.

Meta confirmed the move to TechCrunch. Dave Brown, who arrived at Meta as vice president of infrastructure earlier this year, will replace Janardhan in the top infrastructure job. Brown's credentials are notably cloud-heavy: his LinkedIn shows 19 years at Amazon, where he focused on compute, cloud, and AI.

Bloomberg first reported Janardhan's departure, citing an internal memo that had recently circulated at the company. That memo, apparently written by Janardhan himself, cited the need to "pass the baton." It did not specify any other reasons for his exit, and Meta did not immediately respond to a request for clarification when TechCrunch asked.

Who is Santosh Janardhan?

Janardhan joined the company in 2009 — fifteen-plus years ago, when Facebook was still a fast-growing social network rather than the trillion-dollar tech conglomerate it became. Over that stretch, he helped the firm, in TechCrunch's words, grow into "the massive internet presence that it is today."

His remit covered the physical and computational backbone of everything Meta runs: the data centers, the networks, and the systems that serve billions of users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. As co-head of engineering, his influence extended well beyond servers and racks.

Earlier this year, Janardhan took on an additional assignment: leading Meta Compute, the company initiative to scale its data center investments and strategy. That program sits at the center of Meta's race to keep up with competitors pouring capital into AI.

What does the change mean for Meta's infrastructure push?

Janardhan won't walk out the door immediately. A Meta representative said: "Santosh will stay on for transition and he is moving into an advisory role on Meta Compute." He's expected to leave the company next year.

So the handover is staged rather than abrupt. Brown gets the operating job now, while the executive who built the organization stays available through the transition — a structure that suggests Meta wants continuity in a area it can't afford to destabilize.

The timing matters. As TechCrunch notes, Meta's investment in infrastructure has exploded in recent years as the company scrambles to keep pace with rivals in the AI race. Training and running large AI models demands enormous compute capacity, which in turn demands data centers, power, and supply chains — precisely the domain Janardhan oversaw and Brown now inherits.

Bringing in a leader with nearly two decades of Amazon experience in compute, cloud, and AI is a telling signal. Meta has historically built much of its infrastructure in-house rather than renting it from a hyperscaler; installing someone steeped in Amazon's cloud and AI operations puts deep outsider expertise at the top of the org chart.

Why the ambiguity around the exit?

Here's what practitioners will notice: nobody has explained the departure. The internal memo didn't give reasons, Meta didn't respond to questions, and TechCrunch says plainly that it's unclear why Janardhan is stepping down.

The "pass the baton" framing offers a graceful, succession-planned narrative. Whether that's the whole story, the company isn't saying — and Meta's silence leaves room for interpretation during a period when its infrastructure spend, and the scrutiny of that spend, keeps climbing.

What's certain is the practical upshot: one of Meta's longest-tenured technical leaders is on his way out, and the person responsible for the company's data center strategy — the foundation of its AI ambitions — is now an executive with less than a year at the company.