Dive Brief:
- Peter DeSantis, AWS SVP of utility computing products, will lead a new organization at Amazon, which will focus on growth of the company’s AI models including Nova, development of the company’s custom chips Trainium, Graviton and Nitro, and its efforts in quantum computing, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced Wednesday.
- As part of the leadership change, DeSantis will lead the company’s artificial general intelligence team, taking over for Rohit Prasad, who will depart at the end of 2025. Prasad, SVP and head scientist for AGI, joined Amazon in 2013 and spent the last two years leading the creation of Amazon Nova and the AGI organization.
- The new group will also include Pieter Abbeel, who will lead Amazon’s frontier model research team. Abbeel, an Amazon Scholar and a professor at University of California, Berkeley, will also continue to work with the company’s robotics team, Jassy said.
Dive Insight:
Earlier this month, Amazon launched a raft of AI-related products at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, including advancements in its Nova line. One product, Nova Forge, was regarded as a significant enterprise play, enabling companies to build their own frontier models.
“With Amazon Nova Forge, AWS is looking to deliver real enterprise outcomes,” Constellation Research Analyst Larry Dignan said in a blog post earlier this month. “The reality has been that off-the-shelf foundational models are inaccurate in many enterprise use cases. When enterprises build on top of open source models, results can degrade as more data is added.”
Now the Nova development torch is being handed to DeSantis, an Amazon veteran who has spent the last 27 years leading technology and infrastructure development. In his new role, DeSantis will report directly to Jassy.
Under DeSantis’ leadership, Amazon launched block storage, file storage, load balancing, networking and monitoring services that “AWS customers continue to rely on to run their infrastructure,” Jassy said.
Amazon tapped DeSantis to lead the AWS Infrastructure team in 2016, where he was responsible for the company’s data centers, networking, hardware and supply chain. DeSantis transitioned to lead AWS Utility Computing services in 2021.
“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.
AWS CEO Matt Garman is expected to share information on the new AWS structure following DeSantis’ move in a follow-up note, Jassy said.
The third quarter of the company’s 2025 fiscal year marked a significant shift for Amazon’s cloud AI narrative, with moves demonstrating the company’s goals to converge its cloud and AI products through custom hardware and new AI-enabled services.
