In a move highlighted in a company blog today, public cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that Adam Selipsky, who has led AWS for the past three years, is stepping down as CEO to pursue other opportunities. Matt Garman, a veteran AWS executive with more than 18 years of experience at the company, will take over as CEO effective on June 3.

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, praised Selipsky's leadership. Selipsky rejoined AWS in 2021 after previously serving as CEO of Tableau. Jassy credited Selipsky with helping navigate the hyperscaler's path during the COVID  pandemic and his focus on the long-term customer success of its cloud customers.

“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. Throughout, the team continued to invent and release new services at a rapid clip, including several impactful generative AI services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q,” Jassy wrote. Under Selipsky's leadership, AWS achieved a $100 billion in annual revenue run rate and continued to innovate with the launch of impactful generative AI services like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q.

Jassy said that Garman's career at AWS spans nearly two decades. He started as a product manager, Jassy said, helping to create some of AWS's foundational offerings like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store  (EBS). He emphasized Garman's understanding of the AWS business and customer needs, along with his strong leadership and problem-solving skills.

The departing Selipsky, in this post, wrote he has mixed emotions and cited a desire to spend more time with family and explore new possibilities as reasons for his decision. Selipsky voiced his confidence in Matt Garman and the leadership team.

Garman emphasized his commitment to customers, innovation and a unified team approach. However, he acknowledged there will be some organizational adjustments during the transition and promised more details in the coming weeks.

This leadership change comes at a pivotal time for AWS as the hyperscaler market has become increasingly competitive with challengers such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The move also comes when the stakes are at their highest. Gartner forecasts that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is will grow 20.4% to total $678.8 billion in 2024, up from $563.6 billion in 2023.