Amazon senior cloud executive departs after 18 years

long-time manager AmazonThe company’s cloud unit is leaving the tech giant after nearly 19 years announced Wednesday.

Dave Brown, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, plans to leave at the end of this month for a “new role outside the company,” AWS CEO Matt Garman wrote in a memo to employees. Garman said that Brown will be replaced by Dave Treadwell, a senior manager of Amazon’s e-commerce department.

“Dave has been a huge part of what we do at AWS, and I want to personally thank him for all of his contributions to helping the technology, business, and team grow and evolve,” Garman wrote.

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

Recently, Brown’s responsibilities were expanded to include AWS’s computing and machine learning services, such as its Bedrock and SageMaker offerings. It is also one of the names that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy boasts about SteamA highly influential group of 28 managers who report to Jassy and meet with him regularly to make key business decisions.

On a separate note, Brown said he felt like “it’s time for me to turn over a new leaf” and added that his organization is in “outstanding hands” under Treadwell.

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

Brown’s departure comes as AWS capitalized on strong demand for AI services, helping the unit post 28% revenue growth in the first quarter. Cloud competitors Microsoft And Google AI-related spending is also on the rise.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this article.