Meta Compute represents a fundamental shift in how tech giants compete in AI. On January 12, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new top-level organization that consolidates responsibility for building and operating Meta’s global AI infrastructure.
This isn’t an organizational reshuffle—it’s a declaration that infrastructure has become the primary battlefield in the AI wars.
Meta Compute will be co-led by a strategic triumvirate:
Santosh Janardhan (The Builder): A decade-long Meta veteran overseeing data center design, construction, and operations
Daniel Gross (The Strategist): Former Safe Superintelligence co-founder leading capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, and business modeling
Dina Powell McCormick (The Diplomat): New Meta President tasked with government and sovereign partnerships for infrastructure deployment
Both Janardhan and Gross now report directly to Zuckerberg—signaling that compute infrastructure is now on par with product development in Meta’s strategic hierarchy.
Why It Matters Now
Three converging factors make this strategically significant:
AI modelquality is hitting compute ceilings: More compute yields higher-quality models. The bottleneck isn’t algorithms—it’s infrastructure.
Energy is becoming the binding constraint: Power availability determines where data centers can be built and how quickly they can scale.
By elevating compute to a “top-level initiative,” Meta is betting that the future of AI competition isn’t about models—it’s about the physical infrastructure to run them.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
