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Ecommerce group Amazon is shutting down its Shanghai artificial intelligence lab, becoming the latest US company to retreat from Chinese research efforts amid rising geopolitical tensions.
Amazon’s pullback in China follows similar moves by US tech groups, including IBM and Microsoft, which have scaled back their China-based research and development efforts as US officials intensify scrutiny of all China-related AI work.
Wang Minjie, a scientist in the Shanghai lab established by the Amazon Web Services cloud arm in 2018, said in a post on social media that his team was “being dissolved due to strategic adjustments amid US-China tensions”.
“Over the past six years, I had the privilege of leading the team through the golden era of foreign research labs in China,” he said in the WeChat post seen by the Financial Times.
Wang said the group had published more than 100 academic papers and pioneered work on an open-source framework for neural networks designed to work with data represented as graphs, which had helped generate nearly $1bn in sales for Amazon.
The Shanghai closure comes as Amazon cuts staff globally. Chief executive Andy Jassy last month warned employees that rising AI adoption would lead to job losses across the organisation.
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said on Wednesday: “We’ve made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS.”
He added: “These decisions are necessary as we continue to invest, hire, and optimise resources.”
The headcount at the AWS Shanghai research lab is unclear. In 2022, Amazon reported having more than 10,000 employees in China. AWS at its peak had more than 1,000 staff in China, according to people familiar with the matter.
Most of the company’s cloud business in the country is focused on serving multinationals that operate in China, as well as Chinese tech groups that use AWS for their global operations.
The ability of China-based AI researchers to collaborate with peers outside the country is increasingly being hindered by US export controls on chips and cloud computing services, which aim to prevent China from accessing the most advanced hardware.
IBM cut more than 1,000 research and development jobs last year, spread across several offices in mainland cities. Also in 2024, Microsoft offered to relocate hundreds of Chinese staff working on cloud and AI, as Washington continued to restrict China’s access to sensitive technologies.
In 2023, Amazon closed its Chinese ebook store, following an ecommerce retreat in 2019 amid intense competition from local rivals such as Alibaba and Pinduoduo.
Additional reporting by Nian Liu
