Amazon Web Services is committing $1bn to embed its own engineers inside customer companies. It is the first cloud giant to copy a playbook that Palantir built and that OpenAI and Anthropic have since adopted.
Amazon Web Services said on June 30, 2026 that it would pour $1bn into a new Forward Deployed Engineering unit. The team’s job is to help customers build and run artificial intelligence systems.
Francessca Vasquez, the company’s vice-president of frontier AI engineering and services, set out the plan in an interview with CNBC. Her pitch came down to one word: speed.
A forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, is a technical specialist who works from inside a client’s business rather than from the vendor’s own offices. Palantir coined the term more than a decade ago. The idea has since spread to software firms that want faster adoption of their tools, and it now sits at the centre of the race to sell enterprise AI.
What AWS is actually building
