Amazon continues to withdraw from China and closes its AI research lab in Shanghai, founded in 2018. The decision comes amid growing geopolitical tensions between the US and China, increasingly burdening technology transfer. In doing so, the e-commerce company follows US rivals like IBM and Microsoft, who have recently also significantly reduced their research and development activities in China.

A laboratory team leader, Wang Minjie, confirmed the dissolution in a WeChat post: "Our team will be dissolved due to strategic adjustments amid U.S.-China tensions." The AWS lab had published over 100 scientific papers and was instrumental in developing an open-source framework for graph-based neural networks—a technology that, according to Amazon, generated around one billion dollars in revenue.

Amazon itself commented on the closure only briefly.

The closure coincides with a phase of global job cuts at Amazon.

The step exemplifies the increasingly difficult conditions for Western technology companies in China. US export controls have massively restricted Chinese companies' access to high-performance semiconductors and cloud services since 2023. The transnational exchange of AI research is increasingly being blocked. Microsoft also offered several hundred China-based cloud and AI experts relocation options abroad at the beginning of the year.

Amazon had already gradually withdrawn from the Chinese market in previous years. In 2019, the company ended its e-commerce business on the mainland. Last year, the closure of the Kindle Store in China followed. The remaining AWS activities primarily focus on supporting multinational customers in China and Chinese companies with international operations.