Amazon Web Services Inc. has reportedly closed an artificial intelligence lab that it operated in Shanghai.

The Financial Times reported the move today.

The Amazon Web Services AI Shanghai Lablet, as the shuttered facility was known, opened in 2018. It’s unclear how many staffers the center employed. The researchers’ areas of focus included natural language processing and AI development tooling.

AWS’ Shanghai AI lab played a key role in creating the Deep Graph Library, an open-source tool for training graph neural networks. Those are AI models optimized to process graphs. A graph is a data structure that can describe how different business records relate to one another, which is valuable for many analytics projects.

A former applied scientist at the lab reportedly announced its closure in a post on WeChat, China’s most popular social network. The Financial Post cited the researcher as saying that the lab “was being dissolved due to strategic adjustments amid U.S.-China tensions.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. rescinded rules that prevented Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. from exporting AI chips to China. However, officials have indicated that they could increase scrutiny of such chip sales going forward. A newly released policy paper from the White House recommends that the U.S. government “pursue creative approaches to export control enforcement.”

It’s also possible the closure of the AI lab is related to a recent round of layoffs at AWS. According to Reuters, the Amazon.com Inc. unit has cut “at least hundreds” of roles. It’s believed that AWS’ training and certification team was among the affected business units.

“After a thorough review of our organization, our priorities, and what we need to focus on going forward, we’ve made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS,” an Amazon spokesperson told Nikkei Asia today.

Other companies are also scaling back their AI work in China. The Financial Times cited sources as saying that McKinsey & Co., a management consulting firm, has instructed its business unit in China to avoid taking on generative AI projects. The unit employs more than 1,000 workers.

Earlier this year, AWS rival Microsoft Corp. reportedly extended relocation offers to 700-800 of its staffers in China. According to the Wall Street Journal, the employees who received the offers work on AI and cloud projects. The staffers reportedly represent about 10% of the workforce at Microsoft’s Asia Pacific research and development group, which is largely based in China.

It’s believed the company earlier shuttered its IoT and AI Insider Lab in Shanghai. Microsoft operates several such facilities around the world. As of 2017, they focused on helping the company’s customers build AI-powered connected devices.

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