Amazon’s new AI team will report to CEO

Amazon has set up a new in-house AI organization reporting direct to the CEO, responsible for its Nova range of AI models, silicon development (the Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro chips) and the emerging development of quantum computing. The new move will bring AI and advanced technology research into the heart of Amazon itself, where previously it was part of Amazon Web Services.

The new organization will be headed by Amazon veteran Peter DeSantis, who launched the company’s cloud storage service EC2 and is the current leader of AWS’s Utility Computing Services.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the change in a letter to staff, saying DeSantis had a track record of solving problems at the edge of what’s technically possible. “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.”

DeSantis will report directly to Jassy, rather than AWS CEO Matt Garman, stressing the importance of AI to the company.

DeSantis has some history here. Last year, he took to the stage at re:Invent to announce the launch of a 10p10u, an enhanced network developed to handle the expected increase in AI-generated traffic.

The more things change…

The introduction of the new division within Amazon itself is a major shift in philosophy. Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst, Greyhound Research said that the move was not a vanity reshuffle. “Amazon is admitting that AI is now inseparable from infrastructure economics, infrastructure control, and infrastructure power. The unit of decision shifts from ‘Which service do I try?’ to ‘Which stack do I align with?’ Within this world: framing, cloud and AI stop being parallel tracks in your organisation but merge into a single platform governance problem.”

While the reorganization has big consequences within Amazon, customers for its cloud computing services are unlikely to see much difference, at least for now.

… the more they stay the same

Brian Jackson, Research Director at Info-Tech, thinks that, in the immediate term, there will be no difference in the way that companies buy from Amazon.  “I don’t see this affecting the way that customers engage or use their AWS services. AWS has its AI products clearly defined now, with agents that help developers produce code, Bedrock to develop applications that leverage a range of LLM options, and then there is SageMaker and Nova Forge for different aspects of AI training. Those products will remain the same,” he said.

The development of Nova 2 could provide an interesting option for organizations. “Amazon positions the Nova family of LLMs as providing outputs that are almost as good as the very best models at a fraction of the cost,” said Jackson. “If you’re looking for an LLM to solve a specific business problem, Amazon Nova is an option you’ll consider and test to see if its outputs are going to be just as effective for your use case as GPT 5.2, and deliver it at a much lower cost per token.”

Justin Tung, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner, agrees that the Amazon move will offer its customers a genuinely new option.  “While organizations seeking the most advanced, high-performance models may not view Nova 2 as the leading option, it provides a compelling balance of speed, accuracy and, importantly, cost. For many enterprise use cases, the ideal model is not necessarily the most powerful, but the one that delivers reliable performance at a more accessible price point – and in that regard, Nova 2 remains a strong and practical choice.”

Quantum computing on the horizon

Perhaps the more interesting move is the inclusion of the nascent quantum computing development within the new organization. Eric Kessler, general manager of AWS Braket, speaking at re:Invent, this year, said that Amazon estimates that fault-tolerant quantum computing will be possible for scientific use cases by the end of the decade.

“Putting quantum computing in this new division makes sense because Amazon views AI and quantum computing as having a mutually beneficial relationship. That is, AI will be used to advance quantum computer design, and quantum computing will be used to advance AI, by acting as data samplers to generate high-quality training data,” Jackson said.

Greyhound’s Gogia said that by pairing quantum with AI and silicon and bringing the whole division within Amazon itself, the company is signalling that specialized compute will increasingly be consumed as managed infrastructure with integrated services, rather than as stand-alone exotic experiments. “If CIOs treat quantum as a branding exercise without governance, they will burn credibility and budget. If they treat it as disciplined R&D with milestones, they build readiness at low cost.”

He added that “Quantum is not a mainstream production lever yet, but it is strategically rational for Amazon to keep it close to its AI and silicon agenda, because when quantum does become useful for narrow domains, the organizations that will move first are the ones that treated it like a governed capability.”

The integration of these advanced services under the general Amazon umbrella is a move that stresses how important AI is going to be to organizations in the future. Amazon recognizes that it’s not just an aspect of IT services but a crucial element in every aspect of purchasing.