AWS puts $1 billion into new AI unit to embed engineers with customers, joining growing wave

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman speaks at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2025. Noah Berger | AWS | Reuters Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced it is investing $1 billion in a new Forward Deployed Engineering unit that will help its customers build and roll out artificial intelligence systems. A forward-deployed engineer , or an FDE, is an employee who is embedded directly within a different business to try and accelerate a technical transformation. Defense contractor Palantir coined the term more than a decade ago, but it's seen a resurgence among software vendors looking to boost adoption by taking talent directly into clients' facilities. Leading model developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic , announced their own FDE companies earlier this year, in partnership with banks, private equity and consulting firms. Now, AWS is looking to carve out its own piece of the market. "We've had capabilities over the years, but structurally this is like getting everybody together in one business unit with a common rubric of deployment," Francessca Vasquez, AWS' vice president of frontier AI engineering and services, said in an interview. "It's the first time we're doing it in that way." Amazon, which is the top cloud provider by revenue, is the first hyperscaler to announce this kind of initiative. Vasquez said AWS' new unit will be seeded with "thousands" of FDEs. …