Amazon will be the first among the cloud giants to invest $1 billion in its AI engineering division

Amazon’s cloud division—Amazon Web Services (AWS)— has announced a $1 billion investment in a new unit called Forward Deployed Engineering. Its employees will work directly with AWS’s enterprise customers, helping them build and deploy artificial intelligence systems. Amazon is the first major cloud provider to announce such an initiative, notes CNBC. In trading on June 30, Amazon shares are down 0.8%. Year-to-date, they are up just over 3%.

The new division will include thousands of engineers. Under this model, small groups of five to six specialists will be embedded within AWS clients’ teams to accelerate their technical transformation. Amazon Web Services expects that within a few weeks of this collaboration, clients will be able to form their own teams ready to work with new solutions. According to an AWS statement, clients already working with the company in this format include the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, Ricoh, and Southwest Airlines.

CNBC notes that this approach was pioneered more than a decade ago by the defense contractor Palantir. Now this model is in demand again: developers of AI models are seeking to accelerate the adoption of their technologies and, to that end, are sending their specialists to work directly at clients’ facilities.

Earlier this year, leading language model developers launched similar projects to help businesses implement new AI models. For example, in May, Anthropic, in partnership with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs—to establish an AI services company for this purpose (which helps mid-sized businesses implement Claude models). Shortly thereafter, OpenAI announced the launch of the OpenAI Deployment Company—in partnership with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital, Brookfield Asset Management, and other partners.

This approach—highly skilled engineers on-site who help clients implement AI (forward-deployed engineering) — a rare exception amid widespread layoffs at tech companies caused by the rapid spread of AI, notes Reuters. Box CEO Aaron Levy wrote on LinkedIn in May that such implementation engineers “are on the verge of becoming one of the most in-demand professions in the tech industry.” According to LinkedIn, demand for such specialists grew 42-fold between 2023 and 2025.

AWS announced that it plans to hire “thousands” of employees for its new division. Reuters notes that Amazon has laid off more than 30,000 employees since October.

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