Key takeaways Amazon has appointed 27-year company veteran Peter DeSantis to lead a newly unified AI organization combining models, silicon, and quantum computing. Current AI chief Rohit Prasad is dep...
CEO Andy Jassy announced Wednesday that Peter DeSantis, currently senior vice president of utility computing at Amazon Web Services, will lead a reorganized unit that combines the company's AI model development, custom silicon production, and quantum computing efforts.
The announcement, shared in a memo to employees and published on Amazon's corporate blog, marks a significant leadership change as current AI chief Rohit Prasad departs the company at year's end.
DeSantis will oversee Amazon's most expansive AI models, including the recently launched Nova family, as well as the Artificial General Intelligence team responsible for Alexa's conversational capabilities.
The new organization will also include Amazon's silicon development teams, which produce custom chips like Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro, along with the company's quantum computing research.
"I cannot think of a better leader for this organization than Peter," Jassy wrote in his memo. "Peter has been at Amazon for over 27 years, and led some of the most transformative technologies in computing history."
DeSantis joined Amazon in 1998 and played a key role in launching Amazon EC2 in 2006.
He led the 2015 acquisition of Annapurna Labs, the foundation of Amazon's custom silicon efforts, and has overseen AWS infrastructure spanning 38 geographic regions and 120 Availability Zones worldwide.
Jassy emphasized DeSantis's technical expertise, saying he "combines unusual technical depth with a track record of solving problems at the edge of what's technically possible, and delivering technologies that operate reliably at massive scale."
Rohit Prasad, who has led Amazon's AGI unit for the past two years, will leave the company at the end of December.
Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 during the early days of Alexa and helped develop the conversational AI assistant that now reaches hundreds of millions of customers daily.
"Rohit has built a strong team, differentiated technology, growing customer momentum, and a culture of ambitious invention," Jassy wrote.
"He's been missionary, passionate, and selfless, and I'm grateful for his leadership, his technical vision, and everything he's built here."
Pieter Abbeel, who joined Amazon in 2024 when the company hired the founders of robotics startup Covariant, will lead the frontier model research team within the AGI organization.
Abbeel is recognized as one of the world's leading AI researchers and co-founded Covariant, which pioneered the first commercial foundation model for robotics. He will continue his work with Amazon's robotics team alongside his new AI responsibilities.
The reorganization comes as Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud computing services, works to maintain its market position amid fierce competition in AI development.
While AWS generated $30.9 billion in revenue during the second quarter of 2025, the company has struggled to replicate its cloud dominance in the AI sector.
Microsoft and Google have reported faster cloud growth rates, with Azure expanding 39% and Google Cloud growing 34% year-over-year, compared to AWS's 20% growth.
Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI and Google's investments in AI research have positioned both companies as formidable competitors in the generative AI market.
Jassy framed the restructuring as a strategic response to an inflection point in AI technology. "I believe we are at this inflection point with several of our new technologies that will power a significant amount of our future customer experiences," he wrote in the memo.
Amazon unveiled its Nova 2 AI models at the annual AWS re:Invent conference earlier this month.
The company has positioned these models as offering industry-leading price-performance and has attracted tens of thousands of companies across various industries as customers.
The consolidation of AI models, custom silicon, and quantum computing under unified leadership represents Amazon's effort to optimize across its technology stack.
"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 explained.
DeSantis will report directly to Jassy, underscoring the strategic importance of the AI organization to Amazon's future.
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