Amazon senior cloud executive departs after 18 years

A longtime executive in Amazon‘s cloud unit is leaving the tech giant after nearly 19 years, the company announced Wednesday.

Dave Brown, a senior vice president in Amazon Web Services, plans to depart at the end of this month for “a new role outside of the company,” AWS CEO Matt Garman wrote in a note to staffers. Brown will be replaced by Dave Treadwell, a top executive in Amazon’s e-commerce division, Garman said.

“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.

Brown joined AWS in its infancy and was a member of the early team that assembled its core EC2 service in South Africa in the 2000s, according to his LinkedIn profile. EC2, one of AWS’ oldest services, provides virtual slices of physical servers for rent, billed by the second, that companies use to run applications and websites.

More recently, Brown’s responsibilities expanded to include AWS’ compute and machine learning services, such as its Bedrock and SageMaker offerings. He’s also part of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy‘s vaunted S-team, a highly influential group of 28 executives that report to Jassy and meet with him regularly to make key business decisions.

In a separate memo, Brown said it felt “like the right time for me to begin a new chapter” and added that his organization is “in outstanding hands” under Treadwell.

“He’s an exceptional leader with deep technical expertise, relentless customer focus, and a genuine passion for building strong teams,” Brown wrote.

Brown’s departure comes as AWS has benefited from strong demand for artificial intelligence services, helping the unit record 28% revenue growth in the first quarter. Cloud rivals Microsoft and Google have also been riding a surge in AI-related spending.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting to this article.