Shanghai, SANA-US tech giant Amazon has shut down its artificial intelligence research lab in Shanghai.
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’ve had the privilege of leading the team through the golden era of foreign research labs [in China],” he said on WeChat 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 organization.
Amazon said closing the AI lab in China “was about prioritizing resources in teams having the greatest impact” and that it had affected around a dozen employees.
khadega/Mazen Eyon
