Amazon Rewires Its AI Leadership

Amazon is reshuffling how it runs AI at a pretty foundational level. CEO Andy Jassy just announced that longtime AWS leader Peter DeSantis will take the reins of a newly formed organization designed to bring together the company’s AI models, custom silicon, and quantum computing efforts. 

At the same time, Amazon’s top AI executive and head scientist, Rohit Prasad, is leaving the company at the end of the year.

Pulling AI’s biggest bets under one roof: why Amazon is restructuring its AI organization

In an internal memo, Jassy laid out the thinking behind the move in plain terms. 

“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,” he wrote.

Amazon just rolled out its Nova 2 models at the re:Invent conference, and its custom chips are playing a bigger role in how customers actually run AI at scale. Jassy framed the move as a way to smooth out handoffs between teams that already work closely together but were previously organized separately.

“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,” Jassy said.

Why DeSantis, and why now

DeSantis has been at Amazon for 27 years and has spent much of that time in the thick of the company’s infrastructure. He was involved in the early days of Amazon EC2, led the acquisition of chip designer Annapurna Labs, and most recently ran AWS Utility Computing, which includes the core services customers rely on every day, like compute, storage, databases, and AI infrastructure. In this new role, he’ll report directly to Jassy.

Jassy described DeSantis as a leader with “unusual technical depth” and a track record of “solving problems at the edge of what’s technically possible.” He’ll step into this role to focus on making hard technical pieces work better together.

Prasad’s exit and what it leaves behind

Prasad’s departure was noted toward the end of Jassy’s memo. Jassy said Prasad “has built a strong team, differentiated technology, growing customer momentum, and a culture of ambitious invention,” adding that the decision to leave was Prasad’s own.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, and later became the head scientist for artificial general intelligence. 

At re:Invent, he spoke pragmatically about AI’s future, pushing back on the incessant buzz around AGI as “some kind of a god power,” and instead focusing on “generally intelligent systems that you can specialize for your purpose.”

What Prasad does next hasn’t been shared. What is clear is that Amazon is doubling down on tighter alignment across AI models, infrastructure, and hardware as it continues to position itself as a serious enterprise AI player, alongside partners like Anthropic and amid reported talks involving OpenAI.

That shift aligns with what customers are encountering on the ground. As more teams try to move AI out of experimentation and into day-to-day use, the seams between models, infrastructure, and hardware start to show. Amazon is obviously focused on making those pieces work together smoothly, which now matters just as much as building the models in the first place.