Sir Nick Clegg has stepped down as Meta’s president of global affairs.
In a post on Meta’s Facebook platform, the former deputy prime minister of the UK announced his departure from the company after almost seven years.
Clegg joined Meta in 2018 as vice president for global affairs and communications after losing his seat in the UK parliament following the 2017 general election. In 2022, he was promoted to president of global affairs. In this role, he helped establish the Facebook Oversight Board, an independent panel that makes content moderation decisions.
In a post confirming his departure, Clegg said it was “the right time for me to move on.”
"My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between 'big tech' and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions, and norms affecting the sector,” he continued.
Clegg will spend a “few months handing over the reins” before leaving the company.
Clegg exits Meta, having sold almost $19 million worth of shares during his time working there, according to the Guardian.
He will be replaced by his deputy, Joel Kaplan. Kaplan has worked at Meta as its vice president of global public policy since 2011. Before this, he served as the deputy chief of staff for policy in the George W. Bush administration from 2006 to 2009.
The appointment of Kaplan, a well-known Republican figure, comes weeks before Donald Trump's inauguration as the new president of the US.
Trump has had a frayed relationship with Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, accusing the company and its platforms of censorship and silencing conservative speech.
However, the relationship has improved in recent months, with Zuckerberg donating $1 million to the president-elect's inauguration fund.
The changes at Meta come at a time when the company is planning to accelerate its spending on digital infrastructure, which was estimated to be between $38-$40 billion in 2024.
Speaking on the company's earnings call, in October, CFO Susan Li said: "We continue to expect significant capital expenditures growth in 2025. Given this, along with the back-end weighted nature of our 2024 capital expenditures, we expect a significant acceleration in infrastructure expense growth next year as we recognize higher growth in depreciation and operating expenses of our expanded infrastructure fleet."
On the same call, Zuckerberg said the company's infrastructure spending had enabled it to build record-breaking GPU clusters to train its AI models.
“We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing," he said.
Meta is looking at using nuclear energy to power its data centers, and in December launched a request for proposals to identify potential nuclear energy developers to support 1.4GW of new nuclear generation capacity across the US.