Amazon Web Services to close Shanghai AI lab amid US-China tech tensions

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined its US peers Microsoft and IBM in downsizing artificial intelligence research activities in mainland China amid ongoing geopolitical tensions.

The company has decided to close its seven-year-old AI Shanghai Lablet due to “China-US strategic realignment”, according to Wang Minjie, the facility’s chief applied scientist, in an announcement posted on Chinese social media platform WeChat on Tuesday.

The announcement has since been circulated online and its authenticity was confirmed by the South China Morning Post.

Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser said in an emailed response that the company “has made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS”, after a thorough review of its organisation, priorities and future plans.

It was not clear how many people would be affected. Glasser added that the company would “support the employees throughout their transition”.

Initially announced in 2018 at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, the AWS lab focused on open-source projects such as the Deep Graph Library (DGL), a scalable framework for deep learning on graphs, and fundamental research in the area of graph neural networks, which analyse data that can be represented as a graph.