In a post on LinkedIn early last week, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Kevin Scott said Jason Taylor, former Meta executive, will join Microsoft.
Specifically, Taylor will take on the role of corporate vice president and vice president of technology to help “build the next set of systems to push the boundaries of AI.”
Taylor worked at Meta from 2009 to 2022, where he most recently served as vice president of corporate infrastructure. According to his LinkedIn profile, Taylor is in charge of AI, data and privacy infrastructure, as well as managing the company's server budget. Taylor also served as president of the Open Compute Project Foundation from 2015 to 2017, an organization promoting open source designs in data centers.
Microsoft and OpenAI need more powerful hardware to keep up with rapidly evolving AI systems. Last month, a report from The Information said that Microsoft and OpenAI want to build a $100 billion supercomputer, dubbed “Stargate,” to power OpenAI's models. (However, Microsoft Chief Scott seemed to dismiss these rumors in a LinkedIn post today, saying that most of the recent speculation was “interestingly wrong.”)
In March, Microsoft announced it had hired Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as CEO of a new consumer AI division overseeing Copilot, Bing and Edge.