Amazon closes Shanghai AI research lab in latest cost-cutting move
Wang Minjie, an applied scientist at the lab, wrote in a WeChat post earlier this week that Amazon disbanded the team due to "strategic adjustments amid U.S.-China tensions."
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in a statement that the company "made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams" in its Amazon Web Services unit.
The Financial Times was first to report on the lab closure.
Amazon announced layoffs at AWS last week, with U.S. teams focused on marketing and training and certification among those that were impacted.
Geopolitical tensions between the world's two largest economies have pushed a growing number of American corporations to reduce or discontinue their operations in China. President Donald Trump's aggressive tariff policies have accelerated that shift, while the Chinese government has called for self-sufficiency in AI and technology development.
The U.S. has also placed restrictions on China, limiting its ability to buy chips and chip-making equipment, including from companies like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, that can be used to train AI models. Some of those restrictions have since eased.
AWS established the Shanghai lab in 2018 with a focus on areas like natural language processing and machine learning.
The company has retreated from China over the past several years. In 2022, Amazon discontinued its Kindle e-book store in the region, after shuttering its e-commerce marketplace in China in 2019.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
26 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
By scrapping bid for California governor, Harris boosts White House prospects -- if she runs
By closing one door, Kamala Harris has left another ajar. Running for California governor in 2026, which she ruled out Wednesday, would almost certainly have precluded another run for the White House in 2028 — something Harris explicitly did not rule out. There were significant hurdles to attempting both. To have any chance of being governor, Harris would have almost certainly had to have sworn off another presidential bid, convincing California voters that the state's top political job was not something she viewed, blithely, as a mere placeholder or springboard to the White House. There also would have been the practical difficulty of running the nation's most populous state, a maw of endless crises and challenges, while at the same time pursuing the presidency. No California governor has ever done so successfully, though several tried. Harris' much-anticipated decision, announced in a written statement, was not a huge surprise. Unlike others — Pete Wilson, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to name a few — Harris has never burned with a fever to be California governor. She had a clear shot at the position in 2016, but opted instead to run for the U.S. Senate, in part because the role seemed like a better launching venue for a try at the White House. Privately, several of those closest to Harris questioned whether she had much appetite to deal with the myriad aggravations of being governor — the stroking and hand-holding of recalcitrant lawmakers, the mind-numbing drafting of an annual budget, the endless march of disasters, both natural and man-made. Not least, many wondered whether Harris would be content returning to the small stage of Sacramento after traveling the world as vice president and working in the rarified air of politics at its peak. There is every possibility that Harris will retire from public life. Sean Clegg, a long-time Harris adviser, noted the Democrat has spent more than two decades in elected office. 'I think she's interested in exploring how she can have an impact from the outside for a while,' Clegg said. For her part, Harris said she looked forward 'to getting back out and listening to the American people [and] helping Democrats across the nation who will fight fearlessly.' Doesn't sound like life in a cloister. If Harris did run for president, she'd start out as a nominal front-runner, based on her universal name recognition and deep nationwide fund-raising base — advantages no other contestant could match. But she won't scare away very many opponents; the Democratic field in 2028 will most likely be a large and expansive one, as it was the first time Harris ran for president in 2020. (And notably crashed and burned.) Charlie Cook, who has spend decades as a nonpartisan political handicapper, said he would view Harris 'as a serious contender, but no more so than a handful of other people would be.' Normally, Cook went on, her status as the party's most recent vice president would give her a significant, if not overwhelming, edge. 'But I think the desire/need to turn the corner and get some separation from Biden probably strips away any advantage that she would have,' Cook said. Harris got a small taste of the Biden burden she could carry in the 2028 campaign when two of her prospective gubernatorial rivals — former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra — suggested she was complicit in covering up Biden's mental and physical frailties. 'She could say she didn't know,' Villaraigosa taunted in a May interview. 'They can't prove that she did. But last time I looked, she had lunch with him pretty regularly ... She had to have seen what the world [saw] over time and particularly in that debate. The notion that she didn't? Come on. Who's going to buy that?' A strategist for one potential presidential rival suggested Democrats were eager to turn the page on Biden and, along with him, Harris. 'There's a lot of respect for her taking on the challenge of cleaning up Biden's mess in 2024,' said the strategist, who asked to remain nameless to avoid compromising an as-yet-unannounced candidate. 'But I think it's going to be a hard sell. She lost to Donald Trump who was convicted of 34 felony counts and run out of D.C. in shame. There is some blame there for his return.' Should Harris make a third try for the White House, it raises the intriguing possibility of facing her fellow Californian, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has been effectively running for president for the past several months. The two, who came up together in the elbows-out world of San Francisco politics, have had a decades-long rivalry, sharing many of the same donors and, once upon a time, the same set of strategists. If the two ran, it would be the first time since 1968 that a pair of major Californians faced off for their party's presidential nomination. That year, Gov. Ronald Reagan made a late, failed attempt to overtake Richard Nixon, the former vice president and U.S. senator from California. At it happened, Nixon had waged an unsuccessful 1962 run for California governor after leaving the White House. While that failure didn't stop him from eventually winning the White House, it certainly didn't help. In fact, Nixon left California and moved to the East Coast, taking a job at a white-shoe law firm and using New York City as his political base of operations. Harris' announcement Wednesday promised 'more details in the months ahead about my own plans.' She said nothing about relocating or leaving California behind.
The Hill
26 minutes ago
- The Hill
Brown University signs deal with Trump administration to restore funding
Brown University on Wednesday announced a deal with the Trump administration that ends three investigations into the institution and restores research funding that was withheld from it. The administration halted more than $500 million to Brown back in April and had opened probes assessing the university's compliance with antidiscrimination laws. The deal restores that money, ends the investigations and restores the university's ability to apply for new federal grants and contracts. In return, Brown did not have to pay a direct fine to the government like Columbia University, but agreed to pay $50 million over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island. It will also separate men and women's sports facilities on the basis of sex, and its health system will not prescribe puberty blockers or conduct gender reassignment surgeries on minors. Brown also committed to ban programs that contain 'unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes' and have 'merit-based admissions policies.' The university agreed to provide data and information to the Trump administration showing its compliance with the agreement. 'By voluntarily entering this agreement, we meet those dual obligations. We stand solidly behind commitments we repeatedly have affirmed to protect all members of our community from harassment and discrimination, and we protect the ability of our faculty and students to study and learn academic subjects of their choosing, free from censorship,' said Brown President Christina Paxson in a letter to the community. Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated this deal on the back of an agreement with Columbia, which paid a $200 million fine to the Trump administration and agreed to more reforms. 'The Trump Administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation's higher education institutions. Because of the Trump Administration's resolution agreement with Brown University, aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex. Brown has committed to proactive measures to protect Jewish students and combat Antisemitism on campus. Women's sports and intimate facilities will be protected for women and Title IX will be enforced as it was intended,' McMahon said. 'Restoring our nation's higher education institutions to places dedicated to truth-seeking, academic merit, and civil debate — where all students can learn free from discrimination and harassment — will be a lasting legacy of the Trump administration, one that will benefit students and American society for generations to come,' she added.
The Hill
26 minutes ago
- The Hill
Luna vows discharge petition for stock trading ban
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) is vowing to file a discharge petition for legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks, as some lawmakers reignite the years-long push to do away with the practice. Luna's office confirmed the congresswoman's plan to start a discharge petition to The Hill. The House is currently on an extended summer recess and is slated to return to session the first week of September. 'Members of Congress should be banned from trading individual stocks because their access to privileged, nonpublic information creates unavoidable conflicts of interest that erode public confidence in government,' Luna said in a statement. 'As lawmakers, we receive classified briefings, shape economic policies, and interact with industry leaders, giving us insights that can influence stock prices.' 'Even if no laws are broken, the appearance of profiting from this access fuels distrust among Americans,' she added. 'The American people do not trust the US government, and this is a step forward to building that trust.' Once Luna files a discharge petition, she will have to acquire signatures from at least 217 colleagues to force a vote on the legislation. The procedural gambit allows consideration of measures if they have support from at least half of the House. Several lawmakers have introduced bills to ban members of Congress from trading stocks over the years. The current push comes after the House Ethics Committee last week found that Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) violated the lower chamber's code of conduct when his wife traded stock of the company Cleveland-Cliffs — which has a facility in Kelly's district — after the congressman received work that an announcement would be made to benefit the company. The trade was made before the information was public. The panel, however, cleared Kelly of intentionally causing his wife to trade based on insider information and having committed a conflict of interest. The effort to ban members of Congress from trading stocks has been long-running, with some lawmakers looking to make headway on the issue that is popular among the public but difficult for some folks on Capitol Hill. Resistance to the idea is, in part, fueled by the fact salaries for lawmakers have been frozen since 2009. It is already illegal for lawmakers to trade on insider information, and the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK) Act, signed into law in 2012, mandates that members report their stock transactions within 30 days. But ethics advocates say the law is not strong enough and does not adjudicate conflict of interest concerns. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) backed banning members from trading stocks in May, telling reporters: 'I'm in favor of that, because I don't think we should have any appearance of impropriety here.' He did, however, make note of the salary freeze. 'If you stay on this trajectory, you're going to have less qualified people who are willing to make the extreme sacrifice to run for Congress,' Johnson said. 'I mean, just people just make a reasonable decision as a family on whether or not they can come to Washington and have a residence here, residence at home, and do all the things that are required. So the counterargument is, and I have some sympathy, 'Look, at least let them, like, engage in some stock trading, so that they can continue to, you know, take care of their family.'' But 'on balance,' Johnson said, 'we probably should' ban stock trading 'because I think it's been abused in the past, and I think sadly, a few bad actors discolor it for everyone.' House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) expressed support for the idea in April after The New York Times published a report that said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) bought tens of thousands of dollars in stocks the day before and day of President Trump's pause in tariffs, which sparked a rise in the markets. The House came close to voting on legislation to ban member stock trading in 2021, but it never made it to the floor for consideration. Ethics watchdogs and some Democrats at the time said it was not strong enough, and Republicans were frustrated that they were not included in the process.
