Amazon names Matt Garman as CEO of AWS to replace Adam Selipsky

(Bloomberg) — The head of Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing division, Adam Selipsky, is stepping down, making way for Matt Garman, the unit’s top sales and marketing executive.

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Selipsky, who has led Amazon Web Services since 2021, will step down from his role next month “to move on to his next challenge,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in an email to employees on Tuesday. He will be succeeded by Garman starting June 3.

The cloud unit, the biggest seller of rented computing capacity and data storage, has long accounted for the majority of Amazon’s operating revenue, serving as an ATM that gives the parent company more flexibility to make big investments in other areas. AWS reported its highest sales growth in a year last quarter and is on track to generate more than $100 billion in revenue over a year for the first time.

The unit is racing to commercialize artificial intelligence services after falling behind rivals Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google in bringing to market its own large language models, the systems that power generative AI products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Amazon executives said last month that the company’s generative AI operation has grown into a “multibillion-dollar revenue-rate business.”

“Matt has an extraordinarily strong set of skills and experiences for his new role,” said Jassy, ​​who led AWS from its inception in the early 2000s until being named to the top role at Amazon in 2021. “He is very customer focused, an excellent product. leader, inventive, an intelligent problem solver, very right, has high standards and a significant bias for action.”

Selipsky was Jassy’s right-hand man during the cloud group’s early years, serving as chief operating officer that led him to lead sales, marketing and other functions. He left the company in 2016 to run Tableau, a Seattle-based maker of data visualization tools that was later sold to Salesforce.com, before returning three years ago.

Selipsky’s second stint at Amazon came as a surprise to many AWS employees, who expected Garman to take the top job. A longtime engineering executive, he began leading AWS’s sales and marketing teams in 2020. Garman began his career at AWS as an intern in 2005, returned to full-time work a year later, and was one of its first product leads. of the unit.

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(Updates with context throughout.)

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