After IBM, Microsoft, this big US tech company shuts AI lab in China, which generated revenue worth Rs...

Amazon is closing its artificial intelligence (AI) lab in Shanghai, in the latest such move that has seen big US tech companies like Microsoft and IBM cutting back their R&D labs in China, said a report. Amazon has cited increasing geopolitical tensions as the reason. This has come amid growing US concerns over China-related AI work. A report by The Financial Times says that Wang Minjie, a scientist at the lab, confirmed the move through a social media post on WeChat.

How Amazon's AI lab affected in China?

Amazon’s cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) established the lab in 2018. Talking about the development, Wang said that his group was being “dissolved due to strategic adjustments amid US-China tensions,” and recounted the “golden era of foreign research labs” in China. Wang also stated that his team had published more than 100 academic papers and created a machine learning framework that resulted in close to USD 1 billion (Rs 86,31,90,00,000) in sales for Amazon. However, the total number of employees at the Shanghai lab are unknown, but according to Amazon the company had more than 10,000 employees in China in 2022, in which the employees under AWS were more than 1,000 staff at a time when the work was at its peak.

This decision comes amid the rising trend of global job cuts at Amazon. In June, CEO Andy Jassy gave the employees a warning that the future application of AI would lead to slashing staff. Brad Glasser, a spokesperson at Amazon, clarified the latest job cuts at AWS, describing them as “difficult business decisions” imperative to “invest, hire, and optimise resources.” “We’ve made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS. These decisions are necessary as we continue to invest, hire, and optimise resources,” Glasser said.

IBM slashed more than 1,000 R&D jobs in China in 2024, and Microsoft gave an alternative to transfer hundreds of Chinese employees involved in AI and cloud.