Amazon to close Shanghai AI research lab amid US/China tensions

According to a post on social media by Wang Minjie (an applied scientist at the lab), Amazon will dissolve its Shanghai AI Research Institute. This is the company’s final overseas AI lab. The reason given was a “strategic alignment” between China and the US. Amazon confirmed to Caixin that it was reducing its staff, but did confirm the closure of the lab. The lab was established in 2018 at China’s first World Artificial Intelligence Conference. It focused on graph neural networks research and contributed to open source projects such as the Deep Graph Library. The institute, headed by NYU Shanghai professor Zhang Zheng remained small and did not disclose its headcount. Amazon has been laying off employees globally amid pressure on earnings, and AWS revenue growth has been slowing for the past three quarters. The move follows similar pullbacks made by US tech giants such as IBM and Citigroup who have recently downsized their China R&D operations. This signals a trend of reduced American technology investment in China amid rising geopolitical tensions.[Caixin (in Chinese)