Amazon is consolidating its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI), custom silicon and quantum computing efforts into a new organization under leader and longtime AWS executive Peter DeSantis, the company said in an internal memo from CEO Andy Jassy.
The reorganization brings together Amazon’s Nova AI models and artificial general intelligence (AGI) research, its in-house chip programs including Graviton, Trainium and Nitro, and its quantum computing initiatives. Jassy said the move reflects an inflection point for technologies expected to power a growing share of Amazon’s future customer experiences. DeSantis will report directly to Jassy.
DeSantis, who has spent more than 27 years at Amazon, has played a significant role in building AWS. He led Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud at its launch in 2006 and later oversaw the development of core infrastructure services such as block and file storage, load balancing, networking and monitoring. He also spearheaded Amazon’s 2015 acquisition of Annapurna Labs, which became the foundation of its custom silicon strategy.
Amazon ranks No. 1 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database. The database is how Digital Commerce 360 tracks the largest North American online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.
Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. That database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).
About the new AWS AI leader
Since 2021, DeSantis has led AWS Utility Computing, which includes compute, storage, database, analytics and AI services. Amazon said those teams will continue under their current leadership, with some added responsibilities. AWS chief executive officer Matt Garman is expected to share details of the updated AWS structure in a follow-up announcement.
As part of the changes, Pieter Abbeel, a prominent AI researcher and co-founder of robotics AI company Covariant, will lead Amazon’s frontier model research team within the AGI organization. Abbeel will also continue his work with Amazon’s robotics unit.
The leadership shift follows the recent launch of Amazon’s Nova 2 models at AWS re:Invent and coincides with increased investment in AI infrastructure, including new generations of Graviton and Trainium chips.
Jassy also said Rohit Prasad will leave the company at the end of the year. Prasad led Amazon’s AGI organization and previously played a key role in building Alexa. He joined Amazon in 2013. Over the past two years, Prasad oversaw the development of Amazon’s foundation models, which the company said tens of thousands of businesses now use.
Amazon said the restructuring is intended to tighten coordination across AI models, silicon, and cloud infrastructure as it expands AI-driven services across its consumer, enterprise, and cloud businesses.
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