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T. Michael Cornelia

Athens, GA · LinkedIn · Contact

Data center operations executive with 13+ years at Meta. Joined when the fleet was at the Megawatt scale and have grown with the team through multiple Gigawatts, now scaling toward dozens of Gigawatts. Currently directing operations for a multi-campus region supporting a significant share of the company’s AI compute and power capacity. Expertise spans new region turn-up and provisioning, workforce strategy, AI-first operations, cloud/colo hybrid models, quality systems, and organizational design at hyperscale.

Experience

Director, Global Operations — South Region

Meta Platforms, Inc. · 2025 – Present

Direct all site operations for Meta’s South region — multiple data center campuses across the Southeast and beyond, supporting a significant share of the company’s AI compute and power capacity. Lead a team overseeing production operations, capacity delivery, and site readiness.

Scale & Growth

• Lead one of Meta’s largest regional concentrations of AI compute infrastructure
• Team is scaling the region through multiple concurrent new builds, expansions, and facility activations delivering significant new capacity every quarter
• Currently supporting the turn-up of Hyperion in Louisiana — Meta’s next-generation campus, the size of Manhattan and 5 GW at full build-out

New Region Turn-Up & Provisioning

• Manage continuous pipeline of turn-ups across liquid-cooled facilities, rapid deployment structures, cable expansions, and leased data centers

Organizational Strategy & Workforce Planning

• Designed and executed major organizational restructuring — centralized enablement functions, optimized headcount while preserving tax incentive compliance

Capacity Planning & Risk Management

• Created region-level capacity delivery risk framework combining construction risk with operational signals into a unified, continuously refreshed leadership dashboard
• Standardized capacity engineering processes, launched root cause corrective action (RCCA) framework, and established quarterly quality assessments
• Manage region SLOs against rack turn-up, redeployment, and decommission targets with per-site tracking

AI & Emerging Technology

• Operate at the leading edge of server hardware — dozens of new platforms flow through the NPI pipeline each year with minimal telemetry or diagnostics, requiring our team to drive continuous improvement in troubleshooting and repair quality
• Leveraging Agentic AI to close the diagnostics gap — automated repair agents, human-in-the-loop troubleshooting, and AI-powered quality scoring that compound diagnostic accuracy across the fleet
• Sponsored enterprise-wide Quality Metrics Workshop — produced a multi-tier composite scoring framework, retired legacy metrics, and introduced LLM-based quality assessment of repair tickets

Government Relations & Community

• Represent Meta in state-level legislative advocacy for data center tax incentive preservation
• Graduate of Leadership North Carolina; maintain statewide network of leaders across public and private sectors
• Manage relationships with government officials, economic development authorities, and community organizations across eight states and growing

Director, Site Operations — Stanton Springs, GA

Meta Platforms, Inc. · 2022 – 2025

Directed site operations for Meta’s Stanton Springs (Newton County, GA) data center campus — one of the fastest-growing campuses in the fleet.

• Drove multi-site expansion of the region as it grew across new greenfield turn-up and expansion via leased colo facilities
• Built and deployed an operational excellence framework (analytics SOPs, QBRs, established SLOs, 1:1 templates, meeting cadences) adopted across all regions globally
• Launched diagnostic accuracy initiative to reduce repeat repairs and lower headcount growth — quantified cost impact to justify tooling investments
• Built government and community relationships across Newton County and the state of Georgia

Data Center Operations Manager — Stanton Springs, GA

Meta Platforms, Inc. · 2018 – 2022

Managed infrastructure operations teams at Meta’s Stanton Springs campus during a period of rapid expansion and new building commissioning.

• Owned all capacity-related projects across the campus as it went from dirt to provisioning, including new building commissioning and expansion phases
• Directed the turn-up of the largest known NVIDIA A100 GPU neural network at the time; then followed that with the largest known H100 GPU neural network
• Managed cross-functional coordination across construction, production operations, and headquarters teams for turn-up, turn-down, and retrofit execution
• Developed operational processes and standards subsequently adopted at other sites
• Mentored individual contributors across multiple technical teams

Data Center Operations Manager — Forest City, NC

Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook) · 2013 – 2018

Led infrastructure teams at Meta’s North Carolina campus during rapid fleet expansion.

• Owned all capacity-related projects across the campus, including commissioning of the site’s third data center building
• Managed cross-functional coordination across construction, production operations, and headquarters teams for turn-up, turn-down, and retrofit execution
• Developed capacity processes adopted fleet-wide; mentored individual contributors across multiple teams
• Built local government and community engagement relationships at city and county levels

Earlier Career

System Engineer & Architect — SUM/IT Systems · 2004 – 2013
Designed and deployed systems solutions (Unix, Linux, VMware, Windows Server) for SMB customers. Co-created the company’s cloud offering and managed full customer lifecycle from scoping through long-term support.

VP, Operations & Information Systems — The School Box, Inc. · 2000 – 2013
Directed technology operations for a multi-location Southeast retailer (~400 employees). Managed all infrastructure, partnered with CEO/CFO on strategy and budgets, and built the organization’s primary knowledge management platform.

Core Competencies

Data Center Operations · Hyperscale Infrastructure · New Site Commissioning · Liquid Cooling · Capacity Planning & Delivery · SLO Management · GPU Fleet Operations · AI/ML Training Clusters · Agentic AI for Operations · Multi-Cloud (OCI, AWS, GCP) · Colocation Management · Workforce Strategy · Organizational Design · Quality Systems · Operational Excellence · Legislative Advocacy · Government Affairs · Community Development

Education & Certifications