One of Amazon’s top cloud leaders will be joining Meta as the Facebook parent company considers turning its massive AI buildout into a cloud business of its own.

That’s the report from the Wall Street Journal overnight, quoting anonymous sources saying that Dave Brown, the senior Amazon executive who led AWS compute and AI services, will join Meta in the coming weeks to work on its data center build-out.

Meta hasn’t committed to becoming a cloud provider, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the idea is on the table. He told shareholders in May that companies were regularly approaching Meta to pay for access to its AI models or spare computing capacity — a business that would put Meta in competition with cloud providers it now relies on, including AWS.

At Meta, Brown will report to infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, according to the WSJ report. Janardhan co-leads Meta Compute, an initiative Zuckerberg launched in January to plan the company’s data center buildout. Meta has said it expects to spend $125 billion to $145 billion on capital expenditures this year, much of it tied to AI data centers.

Amazon isn’t commenting on the report. We’ve contacted Meta for confirmation and details.

Brown’s departure from AWS was announced on Wednesday, with a warmly worded message from AWS CEO Matt Garman giving no indication that Amazon would try to challenge or restrict his new role on competitive grounds.

AWS has gone to court before to enforce noncompete agreements against departing executives, suing two AWS leaders who left for Google Cloud in 2019 and 2020, respectively. But such agreements have grown harder to enforce. California bars them almost entirely, and Washington — Amazon’s home state — enacted a near-total ban this year, though it doesn’t take effect until mid-2027.

Garman’s message said Brown had decided to take “a new role outside of the company” but did not say where he was going. He’s remaining at AWS through the end of July to help with the transition.

At AWS, Brown will be succeeded by Dave Treadwell, a longtime Amazon executive who has run the technology behind the company’s retail operations and spent 27 years at Microsoft before joining Amazon in 2016. He takes over AWS Compute and ML Services on Aug. 1.

[Update, Friday, July 17: Brown is joining Meta, the WSJ reported. More here.]

Dave Brown, who joined Amazon Web Services as one of its earliest EC2 engineers and rose to lead its compute, AI and machine learning services, is leaving after nearly 19 years. 

AWS CEO Matt Garman told employees in a memo posted publicly Wednesday that Brown will depart at the end of July for an unspecified “new role outside of the company.” Amazon exec Dave Treadwell, who joined the company in 2016 after 27 years at Microsoft, will take over the group Aug. 1.

Brown’s exit comes about three months after Amazon promoted him to senior vice president. Brown had been on the company’s senior leadership team since 2023.

His tenure stretched back to the early days of the cloud. He joined AWS in 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa, where Amazon based part of its early EC2 engineering, before relocating to the Seattle area.

In an interview with GeekWire earlier this year, as the company marked the AWS 20th anniversary, Brown recalled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, then the company’s top cloud executive, gathering the small Cape Town team in those days and telling them the business could one day be worth a billion dollars.

Brown said he could barely grasp the figure at a time when the service was bringing in tens of dollars a day: “I couldn’t even imagine how much a billion dollars was. It sounded like a lot of money.”

AWS today runs at roughly $150 billion in annualized revenue, and grew 28% in its most recent quarter — its fastest pace in nearly four years.

Brown’s role grew with the business. After starting as an engineer on EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, he went on to lead its broader compute organization, including close collaborations with the executives running Amazon’s custom silicon business. His purview also expanded to include the machine learning and AI services now central to AWS, such as the Bedrock and SageMaker platforms.

Treadwell has run Amazon’s eCommerce Foundation, the technical backbone of the company’s online retail operations, since joining in 2016. Before that he spent 27 years at Microsoft, where as a corporate vice president he worked on Windows, Xbox, and the .NET software framework.

In his memo, Garman described Treadwell — known internally as “Tread” — as one of AWS’s largest and most vocal internal customers, someone who pushed the cloud group to innovate and will now lead it.

Brown will remain through the end of July to help with the transition. In his own farewell note, he said it felt like the right time to begin a new chapter. “I’ll be cheering you all on from the sidelines,” he wrote.