The front desk of the Amazon office is pictured in New York, May 1, 2019.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
Amazon is shuttering its research lab in Shanghai focused on artificial intelligence development, the latest belt-tightening move by the e-commerce and cloud computing giant.
Wang Minjie, an applied scientist at the lab, wrote in a WeChat post earlier this week that Amazon disbanded the team due to “strategic adjustments amid U.S.-China tensions.”
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in a statement that the company “made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams” in its Amazon Web Services unit.
The Financial Times was first to report on the lab closure.
Amazon announced layoffs at AWS last week, with U.S. teams focused on marketing and training and certification among those that were impacted.
Geopolitical tensions between the world’s two largest economies have pushed a growing number of American corporations to reduce or discontinue their operations in China. President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies have accelerated that shift, while the Chinese government has called for self-sufficiency in AI and technology development.
The U.S. has also placed restrictions on China, limiting its ability to buy chips and chip-making equipment, including from companies like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, that can be used to train AI models. Some of those restrictions have since eased.
AWS established the Shanghai lab in 2018 with a focus on areas like natural language processing and machine learning.
The company has retreated from China over the past several years. In 2022, Amazon discontinued its Kindle e-book store in the region, after shuttering its e-commerce marketplace in China in 2019.
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