AWS unveils Nova Forge and upgraded Nova AI models to help enterprises build custom frontier models

Reviewed byNidhi Govil

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AWS introduced Nova Forge at its re:Invent conference, a service that lets enterprise customers build custom frontier AI models for $100,000 annually. The cloud provider also launched four upgraded Nova AI models, including reasoning and multimodal capabilities. Companies like Reddit, Sony, and Booking.com are already using the service to create domain-specific models by integrating proprietary data at various training stages.

AWS Nova Forge enables custom AI model creation for enterprises

AWS unveiled Nova Forge at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, introducing a service that allows enterprise customers to build foundation-class models without owning expensive GPU infrastructure

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. For $100,000 per year, organizations can access pre-trained, mid-trained, or post-trained versions of AWS Nova AI models to create custom versions called "Novellas"

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. This approach addresses a critical need expressed by cloud provider customers who want frontier AI models that deeply understand their specific data and domain expertise.

Source: SiliconANGLE

Source: SiliconANGLE

The service employs what AWS calls "open training," allowing developers to blend proprietary data with Amazon-curated datasets at every checkpoint during model training

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. Unlike conventional fine-tuning, Nova Forge lets customers add data during custom pre-trainingβ€”a stage normally reserved for large AI labs

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. "Everyone is looking for a frontier model that's an expert in their domain," said Rohit Prasad, Amazon's head scientist for artificial general intelligence

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. AWS CEO Matt Garman explained that this solves a persistent problem: "What I would really love is a frontier agent or a frontier model that actually just understands my data'"

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Source: AIM

Source: AIM

Early adopters demonstrate practical applications

Reddit emerged as a notable early customer, using Nova Forge to create a specialized content moderation model

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. Reddit chief technology officer Chris Slowe explained that conventional fine-tuning wouldn't work because most models avoid offensive content entirely, meaning they would refuse to analyze materials that need moderation. By integrating proprietary data during pre-training combined with fine-tuning, Reddit built what Slowe calls a "Reddit expert model" that understands the platform's nuances

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. Other early Nova Forge customers include Sony, Booking.com, Nimbus Therapeutics, Nomura Research Institute, and Cosine AI

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The service is also being used internally at Amazon by teams working on the company's stores and the Alexa AI assistant

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. Prasad noted that Amazon developed the technologies behind Nova Forge initially to empower internal teams building custom models

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Nova 2 family expands multimodal capabilities

Alongside Nova Forge, AWS launched four upgraded Nova AI models: Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Pro, Nova 2 Sonic, and Nova 2 Omni

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. Nova 2 Lite serves as a cost-effective reasoning model optimized for everyday tasks, processing text, images, and videos to generate text responses

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. AWS evaluations showed Nova 2 Lite performed equal or better on 13 out of 15 benchmarks compared to Claude Haiku 4.5

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Source: TechCrunch

Source: TechCrunch

Nova 2 Pro represents AWS's most intelligent reasoning model, designed for complex tasks like coding agents and long-range planning

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. It can process text, images, videos, and speech, and performed competitively against Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro in benchmark testing

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. Nova 2 Sonic introduces speech-to-speech capabilities for conversational AI with a 1-million-token context window

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Nova 2 Omni stands out as the first multimodal reasoning model that can process images, speech, text, and video inputs while generating both text and images

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. AWS hopes this multimodal reasoning model will reduce the cost and complexity of integrating generative AI into applications

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Market positioning and competitive landscape

Garman revealed that Nova models are now used by tens of thousands of customers, representing significant growth since the first generation launched last year

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. However, AWS faces stiff competition in the enterprise AI space. A July survey from Menlo Ventures showed Amazon-backed Anthropic controlled 32% of the enterprise large language model market, followed by OpenAI with 25%, Google with 20%, and Meta with 9%, while Amazon Nova held less than 5% market share

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Despite this, Garman expressed confidence in AWS's positioning: "A year ago, there were questions about whether we'd missed the wave, but now, most people are building their production systems in AWS because of what we've built over the past couple of years"

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. The company is betting that the ability to customize AI models at various training stages will differentiate it from competitors and attract enterprise customers seeking domain-specific intelligence. Organizations that build models from scratch typically spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, making Nova Forge's $100,000 annual fee a more accessible option

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