Meta just poached one of Amazon Web Services’ most senior leaders. Dave Brown, a senior vice president at AWS who spent nearly 19 years helping build the company’s compute and machine learning services, is headed to Meta to oversee the social media giant’s rapidly expanding AI infrastructure ambitions.
Brown will report directly to Meta’s head of infrastructure when he joins in the coming weeks, with a mandate centered on two things: building out data centers at a massive scale and constructing something called Meta Compute.
From AWS advisor to Meta’s cloud architect
Brown wasn’t just any executive at AWS. According to a memo from AWS CEO Matt Garman dated July 15, 2026, Brown was part of the advisory group for Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Now he’s walking out the door at the end of July 2026 to help Meta challenge the very company he helped build. Dave Treadwell will succeed Brown at AWS.
