Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, speaks at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on December 3, 2025.
Noah Berger | AWS | Reuters
Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday that it is investing $1 billion in a new forward deployed engineering unit that will help its customers build and deploy artificial intelligence systems.
A Forward Deployed Engineer, or FDE, is an employee who is directly integrated into another company to attempt to accelerate a technical transformation. Defense Contractor Palantir coined the term more than a decade ago, but there is a resurgence of software providers looking to increase adoption by bringing talent directly into customers’ facilities.
Leading model developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, announced their own FDE companies earlier this year in collaboration with banks, private equity firms and consulting firms. Now AWS wants to capture its own market share.
“We’ve had capacity over the years, but structurally it’s like bringing everyone together into one business unit with a common deployment rubric,” Francessca Vasquez, AWS vice president of Frontier AI engineering and services, said in an interview. “It’s the first time we’ve done it this way.”
Amazon, the largest cloud provider by revenue, is the first hyperscaler to announce such an initiative.
Vasquez said the new AWS unit will be equipped with “thousands” of FDEs. An initial group of about five or six engineers will be embedded with an AWS customer at a time, and these employees will also work with AI agents, which are tools that can independently complete tasks on behalf of their users.
AWS said in a blog post that its FDE embeds will work closely with customers’ business, engineering and security staff and that they will look to leave behind self-sufficient teams with new solutions and capabilities within weeks.
“The currency that customers are always talking about right now is speed,” Vasquez said. “We believe FDE is a choice for customers seeking faster value for their stakeholders, their customers and their leadership teams.”
In May, Anthropic announced that it had formed a new “AI services company” with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman Goldman Sachs to help medium-sized companies deploy its Claude AI models.
Days later, Anthropic’s main competitor OpenAI announced the formation of OpenAI Deployment Co TPGAdvent International, Bain Capital, Brookfield Asset Management and other companies. It said the new organization will expand OpenAI’s ability to embed FDEs into companies working on “complex problems in challenging environments.”
Amazon has poured billions of dollars into both Anthropic and OpenAI, but Amazon executives haven’t shied away from competing directly with the labs in some areas. An AWS spokesperson said the company expects the opportunity to work with OpenAI and Anthropic’s FDE companies and will announce more details about its partner programs in the near future.
According to the company, organizations such as the Allen Institute, the National Basketball Association, Ricoh and the National Football League are already working with AWS FDEs. Vasquez said companies in highly regulated industries with diverse data sets will be the next group of users.
“This is for customers who are really looking for ways to evolve their workflows,” Vasquez said.
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
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