Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of Amazon.com Inc.

(NASDAQ:AMZN), has declared a $1 billion investment in a novel Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) unit.

During the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, the company announced that the new FDE unit is designed to aid AWS customers in the creation and execution of artificial intelligence systems.

The FDE concept, which involves an employee working within a different business to accelerate technical transformation, was pioneered and popularized by defense contractor Palantir Technologies Inc.

(NASDAQ:PLTR) over ten years ago.