.png)
3 months ago
8
Amazon Web Services has closed its AI lab in Shanghai, China.
AWS confirmed the closure in an email to The Register in which spokesperson Brad Glasser used the same language the cloud colossus sent us when we inquired about last week’s layoffs, to wit: “After a thorough review of our organization, our priorities, and what we need to focus on going forward, we’ve made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS. We didn’t make these decisions lightly, and we’re committed to supporting the employees throughout their transition. These decisions are necessary as we continue to invest, hire, and optimize resources to deliver innovation for our customers.”
For what it’s worth, AWS also used the last two sentences to describe layoffs it made in April 2024.
Amazon also sent us the following explanation:
AWS announced its Shanghai Lab in September 2018 and appointed NYU Shanghai Professor of Computer Science Zhang Zheng as its director, with a remit to “lead the company’s advanced research and development of deep learning.”
The center’s web page states it focuses on four activities:
- Developing and contributing to open source projects, such as the popular Deep Graph Library (DGL) framework
- Basic research and applications in the field of graph neural networks
- Empowering customers through AWS services such as SageMaker DGL and Neptune ML
- Actively cooperating with the academic community
News of the lab’s closure emerged in a social media post by Wang Minjie, one of the scientists who worked at the center. His post described the time of the lab’s foundation as a “golden age” for foreign-owned AI labs in China.
That assessment may be apt, as Microsoft last year offered to move some R&D staff from China to the USA and IBM reportedly did likewise.
- Laid-off AWS employee describes cuts as 'cold and soulless'
- Atlassian migrated 4 million Postgres databases to shrink AWS bill
- When it comes to cloud, it's China against the world
- Alibaba and Tencent clouds see demand for CPUs level off, GPUs accelerate
Nvidia, however, is all-in on Chinese AI research with co-founder Jensen Huang arguing that AI will advance faster if the world taps the top talent in the Middle Kingdom. That attitude recently was a factor in the Trump administration’s recent decision to reverse its ban on all GPU exports to China.
Back to Amazon, which in addition to backing out of AI research in China has already closed the app store and e-book store it ran in the Middle Kingdom.
It's also worth remembering that AWS’s presence in China encompasses just two cloud regions, a tiny number given China’s population. Beijing of course requires foreign tech companies to operate through local partners, an arrangement that can’t be easy for AWS given its investment in proprietary datacenter technology. ®
