Peter DeSantis to lead Amazon's AI models, silicon, and quantum computing efforts

The message below was shared with Amazon employees earlier today.

At Amazon, we often start new businesses in parts of the company where there’s an initial customer need, and as they grow and get momentum, we assess where they’re best situated to maximize potential for customers and Amazon over the long term. I believe we are at this inflection point with several of our new technologies that will power a significant amount of our future customer experiences.

I’ve asked Peter DeSantis to lead a new organization that drives our most expansive AI models (e.g. Nova—and the team we’ve called “AGI”), silicon development (e.g. Graviton, Trainium, Nitro), and quantum computing.

I cannot think of a better leader for this organization than Peter. Peter has been at Amazon for over 27 years, and led some of the most transformative technologies in computing history. Peter was the leader of Amazon EC2 when we launched this revolutionary service in 2006, and built out that excellent team over many years. Under his leadership, we launched Block Storage, File Storage, Load Balancing, Networking, and Monitoring services that AWS customers continue to rely on to run their infrastructure. In 2015, Peter spearheaded the acquisition of Annapurna Labs, our outstanding team that builds our custom silicon, and continues to manage that team. In 2016, we asked Peter to lead our AWS Infrastructure team, who’s responsible for all of our data centers, networking, hardware, and associated supply chain. To give you an idea of scale, our infrastructure stretches across 38 geographic regions and 120 Availability Zones around the world. In 2021, Peter moved to lead all of our AWS Utility Computing services (e.g., compute, storage, database, analytics, various AI services, messaging, etc.), the combination of which is widely recognized as the industry leader and standard-setter in the cloud.

Peter combines unusual technical depth with a track record of solving problems at the edge of what’s technically possible—and delivering technologies that operate reliably at massive scale. Peter embodies our leadership principles. His ability to invent, think big but be neck-deep in the details, insist on the highest standards, learn and be curious, focus on what matters to customers, and be right much of the time are among the many traits that make him so effective. With our Nova 2 models just launched at re:Invent, our custom silicon growing rapidly, and the advantages of optimizing across models, chips, and cloud software and infrastructure, we wanted to free Peter up to focus his energy, invention cycles, and leadership on these new areas. Peter will report directly to me.

As part of this organizational change, Pieter Abbeel will lead our frontier model research team (the team that builds the base model) in AGI. Pieter is one of the world's leading AI researchers, and co-founder of Covariant, which pioneered the first commercial foundation model for robotics. His deep expertise in generative AI and reinforcement learning makes him well-suited to advance Amazon's AI research as we push the boundaries of what's possible for customers. Pieter will also continue his ongoing work with our Robotics team. Peter will share the rest of the organizational design shortly.

Peter’s very strong leaders in AWS Utility Computing will continue to lead what they’ve been leading, with a few additional responsibilities. Matt Garman will share the new AWS structure in a follow-up note.

Finally, I want to recognize Rohit Prasad, who has decided to leave Amazon at the end of this year. Rohit joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, to help us build a conversational AI that could make customers' lives easier. Rohit helped Alexa grow from an ambitious idea into a service that now touches hundreds of millions of customers' lives every day. For the past two years, Rohit has led the creation of Amazon Nova and our AGI organization, building twelve state-of-the-art foundation models with industry-leading price-performance that are now being used by tens of thousands of companies across almost all industries and use cases. Rohit has built a strong team, differentiated technology, growing customer momentum, and a culture of ambitious invention. He’s been missionary, passionate, and selfless, and I'm grateful for his leadership, his technical vision, and everything he's built here. Thank you, Rohit.

The path ahead is full of opportunity. With the foundation that's been built, the traction we’re seeing, and Peter's leadership bringing unified focus to these technologies, we're well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities for our customers. I'm excited about what this team will build and how these foundational technologies will help shape Amazon's future.

Andy

Andy Jassy makes Amazon leadership announcement