Shopify joins PyTorch Foundation as Platinum member to shape AI for commerce

The PyTorch Foundation, a Linux Foundation project dedicated to open-source AI, today announced that Shopify has joined as its newest Platinum member. Shopify, which powers millions of businesses in 175+ countries with its commerce platform, relies heavily on PyTorch for machine learning across product search, recommendations, fraud protection, and foundation model development. Mikhail Parakhin, Shopify's CTO, emphasized that AI is becoming the operating layer for commerce and that this layer must be open to achieve global scale. By joining the Foundation as a Platinum member, Shopify aims to invest directly in the open-source ecosystem it depends on, rather than merely building on top of it.

As a Platinum member, Shopify is granted a seat on both the PyTorch Foundation Governing Board and its Technical Advisory Council (TAC). The company has appointed Shuying Sun, Engineering Manager of the Foundation Model team at Shopify, to these roles. Sun previously led the ML fundamental platform team at Microsoft Bing & AI, bringing deep experience in large-scale training and inference optimization. From this vantage point, Shopify intends to contribute engineering expertise upstream, share insights from running machine learning at commerce scale, and help ensure PyTorch continues to meet the demands of real retail and commerce workloads—especially as agents become a primary interface for commerce.