Microsoft hires former Meta exec to bolster AI supercomputing team

Former Meta executive Jason Taylor is joining Microsoft’s AI supercomputing team. In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott says Taylor will take on the role of corporate vice president and deputy CTO to help “build the next set of systems that will push the frontier of AI forward.”

Taylor worked at Meta from 2009 to 2022, where he most recently served as the company’s vice president of infrastructure. He handled AI, data, and privacy infrastructure, as well as managing the company’s server budgets, according to his LinkedIn profile. Taylor was also the chair of the Open Compute Project Foundation from 2015 to 2017, an organization that promotes open-source designs in data centers.

Microsoft and OpenAI need more robust hardware to keep up with rapidly advancing AI systems. Last month, a report from The Information suggested Microsoft and OpenAI wanted to build a $100 billion supercomputer, dubbed “Stargate,” to power OpenAI’s models. (However, Microsoft’s Scott seems to push back on these rumors in his post on LinkedIn today, saying that most of the recent speculation is “amusingly wrong.”)

In March, Microsoft announced that it hired Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as the CEO of a new consumer AI division that oversees Copilot, Bing, and Edge.