Jonathan Hiliger

Overview

Jonathan Hiliger served as VP of Technical Operations (and CTO) at Facebook around 2008, and is credited as the driving force behind Project Freedom — Facebook's internal initiative to build cost-optimized, workload-specific hardware that would eventually become the Open Compute Project. His core philosophy was that hyperscalers should use targeted hardware rather than multi-purpose OEM systems: "I don't need your Swiss army knife; what I want is cost-optimized hardware." This principle directly shaped not only OCP's founding mission but Jabil's subsequent building-block strategy, as articulated by Jabil CSO Brad Rampelberg at OCP Global Summit 2025.