Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman speaks at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on December 3, 2025.
Noah Berger | AWS | Reuters
Amazon Web Services The company announced Tuesday it will invest $1 billion in a new forward deployment engineering division that will help customers build and deploy artificial intelligence systems.
A forward deployment engineer (FDE) is an employee who integrates directly into another business to accelerate technology transformation. defense contractor Palantir Although the term was coined more than a decade ago, it is experiencing a resurgence among software vendors looking to accelerate adoption by bringing talent directly into client facilities.
Leading model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic announced earlier this year that they would partner with banks, private equity, and consulting firms to form their own FDE companies. Now, AWS is trying to carve out a market of its own.
“We’ve had capabilities for years, but structurally, this is like bringing everyone together in one business unit with a common rubric of deployment,” Francesca Vazquez, vice president of Frontier AI Engineering and Services at AWS, said in an interview. “This is the first time we’ve done it like this.”
Amazon, the top cloud provider by revenue, is the first hyperscaler to announce this kind of initiative.
Vazquez said the new AWS division will be seeded with “thousands” of FDEs. AWS customers will have an initial pod of approximately five to six engineers at a time, who will work alongside AI agents, tools that can independently complete tasks on behalf of users.
AWS said in a blog post that the incorporation of FDE will work closely with customers’ business, engineering, and security staff, with the goal of leaving them with self-sufficient teams with new solutions and capabilities within weeks.
“What customers are always talking about right now is speed,” Vazquez said. “We believe FDE is an option for customers looking to accelerate the return of value to their stakeholders, customers and management teams.”
In May, Anthropic announced it had formed a new “AI services company” with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman. goldman sachs We help midsize companies implement Claude AI models.
A few days later, Anthropic’s biggest competitor, OpenAI, announced the formation of an OpenAI implementation company. TPGAdvent International, Bain Capital, Brookfield Asset Management And other companies. The new organization will expand OpenAI’s ability to incorporate FDE into companies tackling “complex problems in demanding environments,” the company said.
Amazon has poured billions of dollars into both Anthropic and OpenAI, but Amazon executives have not shied away from their ambitions to compete directly with the lab in some areas. An AWS spokesperson said the company looks forward to the opportunity to collaborate with OpenAI and Anthropic’s FDE companies and will share details of its partner program in the near future.
The company says organizations such as the Allen Institute, the National Basketball Association, Ricoh, and the National Football League are already working with AWS FDE. Vazquez said companies in highly regulated industries with diverse data sets will be the next group to hire.
“This is for customers who are seriously considering how to evolve their workflow,” Vasquez said.
CNBC’s Jordan Nobe contributed to this report.
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