Meta plans to poach core executives from Amazon Web Services and is preparing to make a significant move into the cloud business

A core executive from Amazon Web Services plans to join Meta Platforms in the coming weeks, signaling that the social media giant is ramping up its investment in data centers and computing resources, with its cloud computing ambitions continuing to expand.

According to insiders, one of the top executives at Amazon Web Services, Dave Brown, will bring nearly 20 years of industry experience to Meta, reporting to the company's infrastructure head and leading the enterprise data center expansion project.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly expressed his intention to develop cloud services at the company's annual shareholder meeting in May. He stated that self-developed cloud services are "absolutely under consideration," and almost every week, companies proactively approach Meta seeking access to its AI large model invocation permissions or are willing to pay a premium for Meta's idle computing resources.

He mentioned, "Currently, we have not opened up computing resource leasing to the outside because our own business still consumes a large amount of computing power; however, if we have excess computing reserves in the future, providing cloud services externally will become an optional path."

Dave Brown's move to Meta highlights the increasing demand for top executives with experience in building computing infrastructure against the backdrop of the AI application explosion. Tech giants like Meta and Amazon, with robust balance sheets, have planned investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars, on one hand, to reserve sufficient computing power to support their own business growth, and on the other hand, to plan for offering computing services to external customers.

Meta expects its capital expenditure this year to be between $125 billion and $145 billion, with the vast majority of funds allocated for AI data center expansion.

Zuckerberg is accelerating AI research and hoarding massive computing power, and Dave Brown is another heavyweight executive in the infrastructure field he has recently recruited.

In January of this year, Zuckerberg launched a top-level strategic project called MetaCompute, planning to establish computing clusters with a long-term scale of hundreds of gigawatts. This project is coordinated by Santosh Janardan, the head of Meta's infrastructure (to whom Dave Brown will report after joining), and is being advanced in collaboration with Daniel Gross, who joined Meta last year and is responsible for formulating computing strategies.

Zuckerberg stated that Janardan and Gross will work closely with Dina Powell McCormick, who took office as Meta's president and vice chairman in January, primarily responsible for liaising with governments to promote the construction of data centers. Meta has also recruited two former infrastructure executives from OpenAI to specifically oversee work related to the Meta computing project.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman informed employees in an internal memo on Wednesday that Dave Brown will leave at the end of July to take a position at an external company, but did not disclose further details. Brown has worked at Amazon for nearly 19 years and is a member of the company's core executive team, the S-team, which provides strategic advice to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Brown wrote in an internal letter to all employees: "Leaving Amazon is certainly bittersweet, but it is the right time to start a new chapter in my career."

Amazon Web Services reported revenue of $37.6 billion in the first quarter, a year-on-year increase of 28%