Microsoft Invests $2.5 Billion in New AI Implementation Business

() -- Microsoft (MSFT) is launching a new business unit with a $2.5 billion investment that will help clients with artificial intelligence implementations, the technology giant said Thursday. The new business will be called Microsoft Frontier Co. and embed 6,000 experts at customers across the globe to help co-design, deploy and improve AI systems at scale. Rodrigo Kede Lima is expected to lead the unit as president. Microsoft Frontier helps focus on "end-to-end frontier transformation, enabling customers to amplify their IQ with AI while refining their differentiated value in the markets that they serve," Judson Althoff, chief executive of Microsoft Commercial Business, said in a blog post. On Tuesday, Amazon.com's (AMZN) cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, said it's investing $1 billion in a new unit called AWS Forward Deployed Engineering that is focused on helping customers co-develop and deploy agentic AI tools in a matter of days. "This goes beyond what has been labeled as Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) and will be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry," Althoff said Thursday. Microsoft shares were up 1.9% in.