Meta Hires AWS Veteran Dave Brown to Lead Cloud Infrastructure Push

When Zuckerberg talks about building a cloud business, people tend to listen. Meta is making its most concrete move yet, hiring Dave Brown — an Amazon Web Services veteran with nearly two decades in cloud infrastructure — to join the company in the coming weeks.

Brown’s departure from AWS was confirmed by Amazon’s cloud CEO Matt Garman in a company-wide memo on July 15. At Meta, he’ll report to the company’s infrastructure chief and focus entirely on data center construction — the physical backbone of any serious cloud operation.

The hire lines up with what Meta has been quietly signaling for months. Bloomberg previously reported that the company is planning a new cloud infrastructure business that would offer external customers access to its AI computing power and models. In other words: Meta wants to compete with the very cloud providers it currently relies on.

Zuckerberg himself hinted at this during an interview this month. “We haven’t formally launched a cloud business yet, because our own compute capacity is still meeting our internal needs,” he said. “But if we end up with spare capacity down the road, opening it up and offering cloud services will become an option for us.”

He didn’t specify a timeline, but the infrastructure investments tell a clearer story. On July 13, Meta announced it would expand its data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana to 5 gigawatts, with total investment exceeding $50 billion. That’s the kind of scale that doesn’t get built without a long-term plan attached.

Brown’s move from AWS — where he spent his entire career — is a talent coup for Meta and a reminder that the cloud infrastructure talent pool is relatively shallow at the top. People who have run data center buildouts at planetary scale don’t grow on trees. Getting someone who helped build the world’s largest public cloud gives Meta a shot at sidestepping the learning curve that usually kills late entrants.

The question now is whether Meta can turn its AI infrastructure into a viable business before the current AI infrastructure boom cools off.