Amazon is restructuring its AI team, integrating chip and model development, with a veteran from AWS at the helm.

On Wednesday, December 17th, local time, Amazon announced a major restructuring of its AI-related teams and the formal establishment of a new business unit, aiming to further integrate and strengthen the company's strategic layout in the AI field.

According to an internal memo posted on the official blog by Amazon CEO Andy Garcetti, this new team will be led by Peter DeSantis, an executive from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This restructuring merges Amazon's existing general AI team—responsible for developing the Nova brand AI model and the "digital brain" driving the Alexa voice assistant—with the company's custom chip development department and quantum computing research team, forming a centralized, cross-functional AI and cutting-edge computing organization. This adjustment not only covers the entire stack of technology from underlying hardware to upper-level applications but also demonstrates Amazon's desire to integrate capabilities across the entire chain from chips and models to product experience.

While Amazon Web Services remains the world's largest provider of computing power and storage leasing services, its market influence has not fully extended to the generative AI field in the current fiercely competitive AI developer ecosystem.

Facing the continued offensive from Microsoft, Google, and numerous agile startups, Amazon faces significant pressure in AI model platforms, developer tools, and ecosystem development. This is also considered one of the key factors behind this organizational restructuring.

It's worth noting that this is Amazon's second major consolidation in the AI field. Just months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Amazon unified its AI resources previously scattered across Alexa and AWS.

This latest reorganization further integrates the Annapurna Labs team, which focuses on chip design, into the new system, demonstrating the company's commitment to strengthening its self-control capabilities across the board, from infrastructure to core models, in an attempt to build a more differentiated AI technology stack.

In the market, Amazon's stock performance this year has been relatively lackluster, with a year-to-date increase of only about 1%, significantly lagging behind other tech giants. This organizational restructuring is also interpreted by outsiders as a significant response to Amazon's AI strategy, aiming to accelerate innovation and enhance its competitiveness in the rapidly growing AI sector through resource centralization and cross-departmental collaboration.

As AI technology gradually becomes a core driving force for cloud computing and the entire technology industry, Amazon's organizational change not only concerns its own business layout but may also have a profound impact on the global AI industry's competitive landscape. In the future, this new team, led by Peter DeSantis, will drive Amazon’s deep integration and development in cutting-edge fields such as AGI, custom chips, and quantum computing.