Microsoft Corp. has named Jay Parikh, who previously helped keep Facebook’s infrastructure humming, executive vice president for a new artificial intelligence engineering division. Parikh, who joined Microsoft in the fall and reports to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, will oversee groups including the company’s developer division and AI platform, as well as teams working on AI supercomputers and agents. Microsoft hadn’t previously disclosed what Parikh would be doing.
Microsoft has been overhauling its entire product lineup around artificial intelligence and needs to manage complex infrastructure projects that can help it wring greater power and efficiency from its networks. 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 centres and chips to back that effort.
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“As we begin the new year, it’s clear that we’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift,” Nadella wrote in an email to employees announcing the changes. “Thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!”
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. He left the company now known as Meta Platforms Inc. in 2021 and became CEO of cloud security startup Lacework Inc.
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.
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