AWS veteran Dave Brown to leave Amazon as Dave Treadwell steps in

Amazon is changing leadership inside Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit that investors increasingly watch for signs of artificial intelligence demand. The company said Wednesday that Dave Brown, a senior vice president at AWS, will leave at the end of the month for a role outside Amazon.

AWS CEO Matt Garman told employees that Brown will be succeeded by Dave Treadwell, a senior leader from Amazon’s e-commerce business. The move puts a retail-side executive in charge of major AWS technology groups at a time when cloud providers are seeing rising customer spending tied to AI.

Garman credited Brown with helping shape AWS over a long stretch of its growth. “Dave has been a big part of what we have built at AWS, and I want to personally thank him for all of his contributions in helping grow and develop the technology, the business and the team,” Garman wrote in his note.

Brown helped build core AWS products

Brown spent nearly 19 years at Amazon, according to the company. His LinkedIn profile says he joined AWS early in its development and was part of the team in South Africa that built EC2 in the 2000s.

EC2, short for Elastic Compute Cloud, is one of AWS’ earliest services. It lets customers rent computing capacity in virtual portions of physical servers, with billing measured by the second, so companies can run websites, apps and other workloads without buying and managing their own hardware.

Brown later oversaw AWS compute and machine learning services, according to Amazon. Compute refers to the processing power customers use to run software. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence in which systems are trained on data to perform tasks or make predictions.

His portfolio included Bedrock and SageMaker, two AWS offerings tied to AI development. Amazon also said Brown served on CEO Andy Jassy’s S-team, a group of 28 senior executives who report to Jassy and meet with him regularly on major business decisions.

Treadwell takes over during an AI spending wave

In his own memo, Brown said it felt “like the right time for me to begin a new chapter.” He also said his organization would be “in outstanding hands” with Treadwell.

Brown described Treadwell as “an exceptional leader with deep technical expertise, relentless customer focus, and a genuine passion for building strong teams.”

The transition comes after AWS reported 28% revenue growth in the first quarter, a gain Amazon attributed in part to strong demand for AI services. Microsoft and Google have also benefited from increased spending tied to artificial intelligence, according to CNBC.

For Amazon shareholders, the leadership change lands in a business where product execution matters. Cloud customers rely on AWS to run core digital operations, and AI services have become a growing reason for companies to buy more cloud capacity.

This story draws on original reporting from CNBC.