Amazon has spent the better part of two years watching OpenAI and Anthropic dominate the conversation around frontier AI models. Now the company is betting that a leadership shakeup, billions in investment commitments, and a unified AI organization can close that gap faster than most observers expect.
A new captain for the AI ship
Rohit Prasad, who previously led the company’s AI efforts, departed Amazon by the end of 2025. In his place, Peter DeSantis now heads a newly unified AI organization designed to eliminate the silos that had slowed Amazon’s progress.
DeSantis’s mandate encompasses both the software and hardware sides of the equation. That includes Amazon’s custom chip efforts, specifically Trainium for training AI models and Inferentia for running inference workloads.
The Anthropic bet keeps getting bigger
