Microsoft Hires Former Meta CTO Jay Parikh

Microsoft Corp., which is struggling to bring data centers online quickly enough to meet demand for its artificial intelligence products, has hired one of the tech executives who kept Facebook’s infrastructure running.

Jay Parikh will join the senior management team and report to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

“There are very few leaders in our industry with Jay’s experience leading teams through the rapid growth and scale needed to support today’s largest Internet businesses,” Nadella said Thursday in an internal email to the Redmond, State-based company. Washington also posted it on its website. corporate blog.

Parikh, who most recently led cloud security startup Lacework, previously led development at Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc. Nadella said the company would share details about Parikh’s role “in the next few months.”

A Microsoft spokesman did not immediately comment beyond the CEO’s note.

Parikh joined Facebook in 2009 and spent more than a decade there, working on technical infrastructure and data center projects that helped the company grow into the world’s largest social network.

While Parikh was there, Meta began operations in more than a dozen data centers around the world. As many tech companies shut down their own data centers in favor of rented computing power from Microsoft or Amazon.com Inc., Meta remained one of the few companies capable of building advanced server farms at massive scale.

Parikh oversaw several other tech projects, including Meta’s efforts to lay undersea cables and the ill-fated Aquila drone project designed to transmit wireless Internet to rural areas of the United States.

Microsoft, which has its own undersea cable and data center projects, is increasingly focusing on infrastructure projects that can help it make its network more powerful and efficient. Thanks in large part to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Microsoft is at the forefront of efforts to create tools based on generative artificial intelligence. The company is looking to build data centers and chips to support these efforts.

Microsoft on Wednesday forecast slower growth in its mission-critical Azure cloud business as the company struggles to get data centers up and running quickly enough to meet demand.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)