Jason Taylor, a former executive at Meta Platforms Inc., has joined Microsoft Corp.'s AI supercomputing team. This was announced in a LinkedIn post by Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott.
Scott wrote, "I'm super excited to welcome Jason Taylor to Microsoft, who starts today reporting to me as CVP [corporate vice president] & Deputy CTO for our AI supercomputing efforts."
Taylor held various roles at Meta, including vice president of infrastructure, where he oversaw AI, data and privacy infrastructure, as well as managed server budgets. He also chaired the Open Compute Project Foundation from 2015 to 2017, promoting open-source designs in data centers.
Microsoft and OpenAI are striving to enhance their hardware capabilities to keep pace with the rapid advancements in AI technology. Recent reports suggested plans to construct a $100 billion supercomputer named "Stargate," although Scott appears to downplay these rumors in his LinkedIn post, labeling much of the speculation as "amusingly wrong."
This move follows Microsoft's hiring of Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Alphabet Inc.'s Google DeepMind, as the CEO of a new consumer AI division in March. This division oversees projects such as Copilot, Bing, and Edge.