The head of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) highly profitable cloud computing unit will step down next month after a three-year tenure.
Adam Selipsky, 57, who is also a member of the team that advises Amazon’s CEO, will leave the company on June 3, according to a statement from Amazon on Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Garman, a senior vice president who oversaw sales and marketing at AWS.
Selipsky has spent 14 years at AWS over two stints. He was CEO of Tableau Software, a unit of Salesforce, from 2016 to 2021, when he was tapped to take over the division from Jassy, who had been named CEO of Amazon.
Under Selipsky’s leadership, AWS experienced rapid growth, doubling sales from $45.4 billion from the year before his appointment to $90.8 billion in 2023 and nearly doubling operating income to $24.6 billion during that period.
Still, AWS has been plagued with criticism for not being quick enough to deploy competitive generative AI services to meet the challenge presented by its competitors, including OpenAI. It recently made its Amazon Q chatbot service available to businesses.
It was not immediately clear what Selipsky might do next, although he said he was leaving the company to “spend more time with family.”
While it has the largest share of the US cloud market, AWS’s dominance is under pressure from Microsoft’s fast-growing Azure service, which is benefiting from artificial intelligence offerings fueled by its partnership with OpenAI. . And Alphabet’s Google is expected to launch new artificial intelligence services on Tuesday at its annual developers conference.
AWS, Amazon’s second-largest business unit after e-commerce, is widely considered Amazon’s growth engine, contributing about 40% of the company’s top line.
Garman started at Amazon as an intern during the summer of 2005 and joined the company full-time the following year as one of its first product managers.
Selipsky also led AWS through several rounds of layoffs, including a few hundred jobs in April in the unit that oversees technology sales and marketing at brick-and-mortar stores. AWS was among the hardest hit divisions in 2023, when Amazon cut about 27,000 jobs.