Ecommerce group Amazon is shutting down its Shanghai artificial intelligence lab, becoming the latest US company to retreat from Chinese research efforts amid rising geopolitical tensions.
Amazon’s pullback in China follows similar moves by US tech groups, including IBM and Microsoft, which have scaled back their China-based research and development efforts as US officials intensify scrutiny of all China-related AI work.
Wang Minjie, a scientist in the Shanghai lab established by the Amazon Web Services cloud arm in 2018, said in a post on social media that his team was “being dissolved due to strategic adjustments amid US-China tensions”.