Meta's Next AI Rival May Be Amazon, Not OpenAI

Meta has hired Dave Brown, a senior vice president who spent nearly 19 years at Amazon Web Services and most recently ran its compute and machine learning organisation, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Brown is expected to report to Meta's head of infrastructure and play a central role in the company's rapidly expanding data centre strategy. The move is more than another executive transfer between Big Tech rivals.

It shows how aggressively Meta is repositioning itself from being primarily a social media company into one of the world's largest AI infrastructure providers.

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Why Meta Wants an Amazon Cloud Veteran

Brown joined Amazon in 2007 as one of the earliest engineers working on EC2, AWS's foundational rentable server product, out of an engineering outpost in Cape Town, South Africa, before relocating to Seattle. 

Over the next two decades, his role expanded from that single product into oversight of AWS's entire compute and machine learning portfolio, including Bedrock, the platform AWS uses to host and serve foundation models, and SageMaker.