A former Meta Platforms executive has taken on a senior executive role within Microsoft's data center team.

Jason Taylor, who oversaw data center expansion and server chip development for Meta as the vice president of infrastructure, is moving to Microsoft, reports The Information.

Taylor worked for Meta for almost 14 years, leaving the company in September 2022. According to his LinkedIn, since then his only role has been as an investor in Intrepid Ventures.

The Information cites a person "with direct knowledge," who says that Taylor will be joining Microsoft with a similar role to that which he held at Meta, and will work below CTO Kevin Scott.

Microsoft has recently been increasing its spending on data centers. With several projects underway, including plans for a $100 billion 5GW 'Stargate' AI data center, Capex on data centers could reach $115bn, more than double the normal spend on its Azure data centers, chips, and networking equipment.

Taylor is expected to be a part of discussions regarding these data center supercomputers, and may also take over some of the duties of Brian Harry, a senior executive in the data center team who is planning to retire.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said in a LinkedIn post: "I’m super excited to welcome Jason Taylor to Microsoft, who starts today reporting to me as CVP & Deputy CTO for our AI supercomputing efforts.
There’s recently been a bunch of speculation about our supercomputing plans, most of it amusingly wrong. But it is true that this work is mind-boggling in its ambition and complexity. It takes a special kind of team to pursue a goal that requires the assumption you’ll be able to solve a bunch of previously impossible problems, and our Azure supercomputing teams have done that with each successive system we’ve built.

"Having led a large portion of infrastructure at Meta and chaired the Open Compute Project Foundation, among many other things, Jason has spent the better part of his career taking on impossible computing challenges."