Meta is losing one of its longest-serving executives to the AI infrastructure boom. Dave Wehner, the company's chief strategy officer and its former chief financial officer, is leaving to become chief financial officer of Fireworks AI, an inference startup that helps companies run open AI models. The Information first reported the move, and Wehner confirmed it himself on X on Friday.

Fireworks chief executive Lin Qiao told CNBC that Wehner will be tasked with scaling the company's finances and operations. Neither company has said when he starts, and Meta has not named a successor for the strategy role.

The hire lands as Fireworks rides one of the fastest growth runs in AI infrastructure. The four-year-old startup raised $1.505 billion in a Series D round in July 2026 at a $17.5 billion post-money valuation, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, and its annualised revenue passed $1 billion by mid-2026. Business Insider reported it is already in early talks about another funding round at a possible $30 billion to $40 billion valuation.

Fourteen years at Meta

Wehner joined Facebook in 2012 as vice president of corporate finance and business planning, arriving from Zynga, where he had been chief financial officer for about two years. He became Meta's CFO in 2014 and held the job for eight years, steering the company's finances through its shift from a social network to a company betting tens of billions of dollars on virtual reality and then on artificial intelligence.

When Susan Li took over as CFO in November 2022, Wehner moved into the newly created chief strategy officer role, overseeing strategy and corporate development. He was Meta's first person to hold the title, and he stayed in it until this month.

Back to finance, at an AI unicorn

Fireworks was founded in 2022 by former Meta and Google employees, led by Lin Qiao, who previously ran AI infrastructure at Meta and helped build PyTorch, the open-source machine-learning framework. The company sells developers a way to customise and run open models quickly and cheaply without owning the chips, serving customers including Cursor, Perplexity and Uber.

Wehner wrote on X that Fireworks has the right mission for the moment and that he has become increasingly bullish on what the company is building. The move puts a finance chief who has navigated hypergrowth and public-market scrutiny at the centre of a startup positioning itself as critical infrastructure for the AI boom — and the timing, with a new funding round reportedly in the works, suggests Fireworks is preparing for its next big step.

A familiar pattern in AI hiring

Wehner's departure follows a well-worn path this year: senior leaders leaving the biggest technology companies for younger AI firms where the growth — and the upside — is steeper. For Meta, the exit removes a veteran who knew the company's finances better than almost anyone outside the chief executive's office, just as it pours money into AI data centres and talent.

For Fireworks, the hire is a signal of intent. A startup that already counts some of the most talked-about AI companies as customers now has a CFO who has run the books of one of the world's largest technology firms. Whether that leads to an initial public offering or simply a much larger private round, Wehner's arrival makes the company's ambitions hard to miss.

By Hamza Faisal