AWS CEO logs off after three years at the helm

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky is stepping down to pursue new ventures. The cloud giant's future now rests in AWS veteran Matt Garman's hands.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who previously ran AWS up until Jeff Bezos' departure in 2021, thanked Selipsky for his 15 years of service at the company in a letter published Tuesday.

Prior to taking over as AWS CEO, Selipsky spent more than a decade running the cloud biz's sales, marketing, and support team before departing in 2016 to run Tableau. He was later wooed back to AWS amid the pandemic, a charge Jassy admitted was always going to be temporary.

"I'd like to thank Adam for everything he's done to lead AWS over the past three years," Jassy wrote. "He took over in the middle of the pandemic, which presented a wide array of leadership and business challenges. Under his direction, the team made the right long-term decision to help customers become more efficient in their spend, even if it meant less short-term revenue for AWS."

However, according to Jassy, Selipsky's hiring was always intended to be temporary. It seems this day has finally come as Selipsky is said to be leaving to explore new ventures following a brief respite.

"After almost 15 combined years at AWS, I am going to be moving on. It has been a true privilege to help lead this business from pre-revenue to $100B annualized revenue," he wrote in a social media post. "I'm looking forward to taking some time off with family, while taking the opportunity to think about my next adventure!"

What that next adventure entails remains to be seen. If we had to guess, Selipsky will emerge at the helm of some new startup before the end of the year.

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Following in Selipsky's footsteps is Matt Garman, who is set to take over Amazon's cloud division on June 3. The 18-year cloud veteran initially joined the company as an intern in 2005 before going on to lead several key product divisions including Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and AWS Compute services.

Most recently, Garman served as SVP of AWS Sales, Market, and Global Services.

"Matt has an unusually strong set of skills and experiences for his new role," Jassy said of AWS's latest chief executive. "He's very customer focused, a terrific product leader, inventive, a clever problem-solver, right a lot, has high standards and meaningful bias for action, and in the 18 years he's been in AWS, he's been one of the better learners I've encountered."

The change in leadership comes amid a massive build up in datacenter infrastructure, including an $11 billion campus in Indiana, aimed at advancing Jassy's AI ambitions. ®