Amazon has executed a major strategic restructuring of its artificial intelligence operations, consolidating its AI model development, custom silicon, and quantum computing teams under a single leader. In a memo released Wednesday, CEO Andy Jassy announced that Peter DeSantis, a 27-year company veteran and the architect behind the massive scale of AWS Utility Computing, will lead the newly formed organization. The move signals a decisive shift in Amazon's approach to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), treating it less as a purely software-based endeavor and more as a massive-scale infrastructure challenge where hardware and code must be tightly integrated. As part of this transition, Rohit Prasad, the longtime executive who championed the rise of Alexa and recently led the AGI team, will step down and depart the company.
The reorganization addresses a critical friction point in the development of modern AI: the disconnect between the "brains" of the system the massive foundation models and the "body" the chips that power them. By placing DeSantis at the helm, Amazon is betting on a "full-stack" strategy. The new unit brings together the researchers building Amazon’s "Nova" and "Olympus" models with the engineering teams responsible for its custom silicon, including the Trainium and Inferentia AI chips. This consolidation is designed to create a tighter feedback loop, allowing Amazon to optimize its software specifically for its own hardware, potentially unlocking efficiency and performance gains that competitors relying on third-party GPUs cannot match.
DeSantis is widely viewed within Amazon as an "operator’s operator," known for his deep technical expertise and his role in building the bedrock reliability of the AWS cloud. Jassy’s decision to tap an infrastructure specialist rather than a pure researcher underscores the company's belief that the next phase of the AI race will be won on logistics and compute efficiency. In his note to employees, Jassy highlighted DeSantis’s unique ability to solve problems at the edge of what is technically possible, citing his track record of delivering technologies that operate reliably at a massive global scale. Under his leadership, the new group will also absorb Amazon's quantum computing initiatives, further centralizing future-facing compute technologies.
The departure of Rohit Prasad marks the end of a significant era for Amazon’s consumer technology. Joining the company in 2013, Prasad was instrumental in transforming Alexa from a novel experiment into a ubiquitous household name. Most recently, he steered the standalone AGI organization, overseeing the launch of the Nova model family which has since been integrated into Amazon’s enterprise Bedrock platform. While Jassy praised Prasad as a "missionary" leader who leaves behind a culture of ambitious invention, the restructuring suggests that Amazon is moving past the experimental phase of generative AI and into a period of industrial-scale deployment and optimization.
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