Amazon names veteran exec to lead new next-gen tech department
Amazon is launching a new organization to oversee its leading-edge technology models.
The online giant is naming Peter DeSantis, who has worked at the company since graduating Dartmouth College with bachelor’s degrees in economics and computer science in 1998, to lead a department that will manage several of its new technologies.
These will include agentic AI development efforts such as its Nova advanced speech model and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) labs, silicon development (such as the Graviton, Trainium and Nitro chips), and quantum computing.
[READ MORE: Amazon adds Agentic AI capabilities to customer service tool]
Previously, DeSantis led the Amazon Web Services EC2 elastic compute cloud platform when the company launched the service in 2006 and built out Amazon Web Services offerings for the next 19 years, including in his current role as senior VP of Amazon Web Services utility computing products.
Other career highlights include spearheading the acquisition of Annapurna Labs, the team that builds Amazon’s custom silicon; as well as leading the Amazon Web Services infrastructure team that is responsible for all of Amazon’s data centers, networking, hardware, and associated supply chain.
In his new role, DeSantis will report directly to Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy. As part of this organizational change, Pieter Abbeel, distinguished scientist, VP and scholar at Amazon will lead the frontier model research team that builds the base model in AGI.
Abbeel is a leading AI researcher who is also a professor at University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of Covariant, which developed the first commercial foundation model for robotics. Abbeel will also continue his ongoing work with Amazon’s robotics team and announce the rest of the organizational design shortly.
In addition, Rohit Prasad, senior VP and head scientist, AGI at Amazon will leave the company at the end of 2025. Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 during the early days of the Alexa voice assistant to help build its conversational AI model. He has also led the creation of Amazon Nova and the AGI organization.
"The path ahead is full of opportunity," Jassy said in a corporate blog post. "With the foundation that's been built, the traction we’re seeing, and Peter's leadership bringing unified focus to these technologies, we're well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities for our customers. I'm excited about what this team will build and how these foundational technologies will help shape Amazon's future."
