Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing unit of Amazon.com Inc., announced a $1 billion investment in a new Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) unit during the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The FDE concept, which involves an employee working within a different business to accelerate technical transformation, was pioneered and popularized by defense contractor Palantir Technologies Inc. over ten years ago. The new unit will employ “thousands” of FDEs, starting with a team of five or six engineers who will work directly with an AWS customer, collaborating with AI agents. Vice President of Frontier AI engineering and services at AWS Francessca Vasquez said the unit brings previously separate capabilities under one organization with a unified deployment strategy. Organizations including the Allen Institute, the NBA, Ricoh, and the NFL are already using AWS FDEs, and AWS expects the next wave of adoption from highly regulated industries. AWS also launched AWS Secret Cloud for Industry for cleared U.S. defense contractors and an accelerator program offering up to $20 million for qualified defense firms. The summit was joined by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Separately, Amazon raised prices by about 20% for AWS EC2 Capacity Blocks used in GPU-intensive AI workloads, effective July 1, following a 15% increase in January.