The CFO job in Big Tech used to be defined largely by margins, operating leverage, and investor discipline. In the age of AI, it is increasingly defined by a more difficult question: how much should a company spend now on compute capacity it may not fully monetize for years to come?
For Susan Li at Meta, Amy Hood at Microsoft, Anat Ashkenazi and Ruth Porat at Alphabet, Hilary Maxson at Oracle, Sarah Friar at OpenAI, and Colette Kress at Nvidia, that question is no longer theoretical. Each is helping steer a company through one of the largest infrastructure buildouts the tech industry has ever seen.
