AWS executive Dave Brown to leave Amazon after nearly 19 years

Amazon Web Services senior vice president Dave Brown will leave Amazon at the end of July after almost 19 years at the company, according to an announcement from Amazon and a staff memo by AWS chief executive Matt Garman. Brown will be succeeded by Dave Treadwell, a senior leader from Amazon’s e-commerce business, as AWS continues to see strong demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure and services.

Garman told employees that Brown is departing for a role outside Amazon. He credited Brown with helping build AWS’s technology, commercial operations and teams, saying in the memo that Brown had been “a big part of what we have built at AWS.”

Brown joined AWS in its early years and was part of the team in South Africa that developed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2, according to his LinkedIn profile. EC2 is one of AWS’s foundational products. It lets customers rent computing capacity from Amazon’s data centers in virtual units, rather than buying and operating their own physical servers, with usage charged in small time increments.

That model helped define cloud computing for enterprises and software companies by turning server capacity into an on-demand service. Companies use EC2 to run websites, applications and internal systems, adjusting capacity as workloads change.

Brown’s remit later widened to include AWS compute and machine learning services, including Bedrock and SageMaker. Bedrock gives customers access to artificial intelligence models through AWS, while SageMaker is used to build, train and deploy machine learning models.

Brown has also been a member of Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy’s S-team, a group of 28 senior executives who report to Jassy and meet regularly with him on major business decisions, according to Amazon.

In a separate memo, Brown said the timing was right to start a new chapter and expressed confidence in Treadwell’s leadership. Brown described Treadwell as “an exceptional leader” with technical experience, customer focus and a commitment to building teams.

Treadwell moves into the AWS role from Amazon’s e-commerce division. Amazon did not describe additional changes to the AWS leadership structure in the announcement.

The leadership change comes during a period of increased cloud spending tied to artificial intelligence. AWS reported 28% revenue growth in the first quarter, a gain Amazon linked to demand for AI services. Microsoft and Google have also benefited from higher customer spending on AI-related cloud tools and infrastructure.

AWS remains a central profit engine for Amazon and a core provider of computing capacity to businesses, governments and developers. Brown’s departure removes one of the unit’s longest-serving technical leaders at a time when major cloud providers are competing to supply the infrastructure and software layers used in artificial intelligence systems.

This story draws on original reporting from CNBC.