Microsoft hires former Meta engineering head

Jay Parikh will join the senior leadership team and report to CEO Satya Nadella

Microsoft Corp., which is struggling to bring data centers online fast enough to meet demand for its artificial intelligence products, hired one of the engineering chiefs who kept Facebook's infrastructure humming.

Jay Parikh will join the senior leadership team and report to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive officer.

"There are very few leaders in our industry with Jay's experience in leading teams through the rapid growth and scale required to support today's largest internet businesses," Nadella said Thursday in an internal email, which the Redmond, Washington-based company also posted on its corporate blog.

Parikh, who most recently ran cloud security startup Lacework, previously led engineering at Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc. Nadella said the company would share details on Parikh's role in "the next few months." A Microsoft spokesperson didn't 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.

Meta broke ground on more than a dozen data centers around the world while Parikh was there. As many technology companies unplugged 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 cutting-edge server farms at massive scale.

Parikh oversaw several other technical projects, including Meta's efforts in subsea cables and its ill-fated Aquila drone project intended to beam wireless internet down to rural places in the US.

Microsoft, which operates subsea cable and data center design projects of its own, is increasingly focused on infrastructure projects that can help it wring greater power and efficiency from its network. Thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Microsoft is at the forefront of the effort to build tools that rely on generative artificial intelligence. The company is racing to build data centers and chips to back that effort.

On Wednesday, Microsoft forecast slower growth in its critical Azure cloud business as the company struggles to get data centers up and running fast enough to meet demand.