AWS launches Nova Forge and Nova 2 models, giving enterprises a path to custom AI for $100,000

AWS launches new Nova AI models and a service that gives customers more control | TechCrunch

Amazon Web Services is rolling out a slate of new homegrown AI models and a service for enterprise customers to build their own custom versions. The cloud provider launched Nova 2, a fleet of four new AI models to its Nova model family, during AWS CEO Matt Garman's AWS Re:Invent keynote on Tuesday. The first version of AWS Nova was announced last year at the company's annual tech conference. At the time, the company released four text-generating models and one image-generating model. This year, AWS is giving the models an upgrade and launching an accompanying service. "The momentum has been really fantastic," Garman said during his Tuesday keynote. "Nova has been, has grown to be used by tens of thousands of customers today, everyone from marketing giants to tech leaders like Infosys or Blue Origin or Robinhood to innovative startups like NinjaTech AI and today, we're making Nova even better." The four new models include Nova 2 Lite, a more cost-effective reasoning model. Reasoning AI models "think" before they respond and can process text, images, and videos to generate text that's meant for everyday tasks. Nova 2 Pro is a reasoning agent that can process text, images, videos and speech that is designed for "highly complex tasks" like coding. Nova 2 Sonic is a new speech-to-speech model to be used for conversational AI. Nova 2 Omni is a multimodal reasoning and generation model that can process images, text, video and speech input, and produce both text and images. Alongside the model upgrades, AWS also announced a new service called Nova Forge which allows AWS cloud customers to build their own frontier version of AWS Nova models called Novellas for $100,000 a year, according to CNBC reporting. This service allows enterprises to access pre-trained, mid-trained or post-trained models for companies to then train on their own proprietary data. Garman said this will be able to solve some of the problems that arise when enterprises try to incorporate their own data into already-trained AI models. "The more you customize models, the more you add a bunch of data in post training, these models tend to forget some of that interesting stuff that it learned earlier the core reasoning," Garman said. "It's a little bit like humans trying to learn new language. When you start when you're really young, it's actually relatively easy to pick up, but when you try to, you learn a new language later in life, it's actually much, much harder. Model training is kind of like this too." Companies including Reddit, Sony and Booking.com are early Nova Forge customers. Follow along with all of TechCrunch's coverage of the annual enterprise tech event here.

Amazon Has New Frontier AI Models -- and a Way for Customers to Build Their Own

The ecommerce giant announced the second generation of its Nova AI models at re:Invent, a company conference held in Las Vegas. The models are nowhere near as popular as those offered by rivals like OpenAI and Google, but Amazon's plan to make them highly customizable could see them gain traction with its cloud users. Amazon detailed two improved large language models, Nova Lite and Nova Pro; a new realtime voice model called Nova Sonic; and a more experimental model called Nova Omni that performs a simulated kind of reasoning using images, audio, and video as well as text. The new models are being made available today to a limited number of customers. More significantly, given the importance of its cloud business, Amazon is also releasing a tool called Nova Forge that will let customers create specialized frontier models by adding their own training data to unfinished versions of the Nova 2 Lite and Pro models. It is already possible to fine-tune off-the-shelf AI models like Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT. But Amazon's approach lets customers add data at various stages of model training, including the process of building the base model, a stage known as custom pre-training that is normally reserved for large AI labs. "Everyone is looking for a frontier model that's an expert in their domain," Rohit Prasad, who leads Amazon's AI efforts, told WIRED ahead of today's announcements. Prasad says that Amazon developed the technologies behind Nova Forge to empower internal teams, including those developing Alexa and AI agents to build custom models. "This is essentially a new open training paradigm," he says. One customer that has already tested the approach is Reddit, which used Nova Forge to create a custom model to identify content that breaks the platform's rules. Fine-tuning a conventional model would not work, says Reddit chief technology officer Chris Slowe, because most models are designed to avoid offensive or violent content entirely, meaning they would refuse to analyze some materials. Slowe says that custom pre-training, combined with conventional fine-tuning, produced a frontier model that is expert at understanding and using Reddit. "Other LLMs understand Reddit as a concept, and how Reddit works, but they're not down in the weeds," Slowe says. "We really built a Reddit expert model."

Amazon to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for $100,000 a year

Attendees pass an Amazon Web Services logo during AWS re:Invent 2024, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024. Amazon has found a way to let cloud clients extensively customize generative AI models. The catch is that the system costs $100,000 per year. The Nova Forge offering from Amazon Web Services gives organizations access to Amazon's AI models in various stages of training so they can incorporate their own data earlier in the process. Already, companies can fine-tune large language models after they've been trained. The results with Nova Forge will lean more heavily on the data that customers supply. Nova Forge customers will also have the option to refine open-weight models, but training data and computing infrastructure are not included. Organizations that assemble their own models might end up spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which means using Nova Forge is more affordable, Amazon said. AWS released its own models under the Nova brand in 2024, but they aren't the first choice for most software developers. A July survey from Menlo Ventures said that by the middle of this year, Amazon-backed Anthropic controlled 32% of the market for enterprise LLMs, followed by OpenAI with 25%, Google with 20% and Meta with 9% -- Amazon Nova had a less than 5% share, a Menlo spokesperson said. The Nova models are available through AWS' Bedrock service for running models on Amazon cloud infrastructure, as are Anthropic's Claude 4.5 models. "We are a frontier lab that has focused on customers," Rohit Prasad, Amazon head scientist for artificial general intelligence, told CNBC in an interview. "Our customers wanted it. We have invented on their behalf to make this happen." Nova Forge is also in use by internal Amazon customers, including teams that work on the company's stores and the Alexa AI assistant, Prasad said. Reddit needed an AI model for moderating content that would be sophisticated about the many subjects people discuss on the social network. Engineers found that a Nova model enhanced with Reddit data through Forge performed better than commercially available large-scale models, Prasad said. Booking.com, Nimbus Therapeutics, the Nomura Research Institute and Sony are also building models with Forge, Amazon said. Organizations can request that Amazon engineers help them build their Forge models, but that assistance is not included in the new service's $100,000 annual fee. AWS is also introducing new models for developers at its Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week. Nova 2 Pro is a reasoning model whose tests show it performs at least as well as Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI's GPT-5 and GPT-5.1, and Google's Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview, Amazon said. Reasoning involves running a series of computations that might take extra time in response to requests to produce better answers. Nova 2 Pro will be available in early access to AWS customers with Forge subscriptions, Prasad said. That means Forge customers and Amazon engineers will be able to try Nova 2 Pro at the same time. Nova 2 Omni is another reasoning model that can process incoming images, speech, text and videos, and it generates images and text. It's the first reasoning model with that range of capability, Amazon said. Amazon hopes that, by delivering a multifaceted model, it can lower the cost and complexity of incorporating AI models into applications. Tens of thousands of organizations are using Nova models each week, Prasad said. AWS has said it has millions of customers. Nova is the second-most popular family of models in Bedrock, Prasad said. The top group of models are from Anthropic.

AWS Nova Forge could be your company's cue to start building custom AI models

Nova 2 introduces a range of foundational models for usage too AWS has revealed Nova Forge, a new service which will allow users to customize the company's AI models exactly to their liking. Announced at AWS re:Invent 2025, the platform will see customers build frontier models by first selecting a starter model and checkpoint, before mixing their data with Amazon-curated datasets, before deploying on Bedrock. The company also revealed Amazon Nova 2 with four new foundation models, available in three tiers - scaling from everyday workloads up to more complex work, and a new speech-to-speech humanlike conversations. Available for $100,000 a year, Nova Forge will allow customers to create "Novellas" - custom versions of AWS Nova models. These can be pre-trained, mid-trained or post-trained models, with companies then able to train on their own proprietary data, much cheaper than doing things from scratch, which can cost millions of dollars and take up thousands of workers hours. "The more you customize models, the more you add a bunch of data in post training, these models tend to forget some of that interesting stuff that it learned earlier the core reasoning," AWS CEO Matt Garman said in his keynote. "It's a little bit like humans trying to learn new language. When you start when you're really young, it's actually relatively easy to pick up, but when you try to, you learn a new language later in life, it's actually much, much harder. Model training is kind of like this too." Nova was first announced in 2024, and Nova Forge is already being used across several internal Amazon teams.

With Nova Forge, AWS gives companies a path to build foundation-class models without GPUs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leaning into the growing trend toward custom models with a new service that it says will let enterprises bring more personalization and internal knowledge. The move comes alongside the release of AWS's new models as part of its Nova family, which expands the capabilities of its reasoning models. Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Pro, Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Omni update the first Nova models AWS announced last year. Nova 2 Lite is a fast, cost-effective reasoning model optimized for everyday tasks that can process text, images and videos to generate text. Nova 2 Pro, which AWS said is its most intelligent reasoning model, can handle complex tasks such as coding agents, long-range planning and problem-solving. It can act as a "teacher" model for distillation projects. Nova 2 Sonic is a speech-to-speech model, while Nova 2 Omni enables organizations to generate both text and images from text, image and video inputs. Nova Act, AWS's browser agent -- announced as an experimental development kit in April -- is also powered by the Nova 2 models and now available to customers. However, it is the custom model service, Nova Forge, that AWS is most excited about. The service gives customers the ability to introduce proprietary data to a pre-trained model without fear that the model will forget its previous training. Nova Forge allows enterprises to create custom, optimized versions of Nova models, which it calls "Novellas," and bring them directly to its Amazon Bedrock platform. Custom model creation Enterprises are increasingly turning to model distillation or custom models, especially with many industries choosing to create foundation models with domain-specific knowledge. But these can often be out of reach for many companies, as not everyone can afford several Nvidia GPU H100s to build models from scratch. As a result, they turn to heavily fine-tuned open-source off-the-shelf models. "You just don't have a great way to get a frontier model that deeply understands your data and your domain," AWS CEO Matt Garman said during his keynote speech at AWS's annual re: Invent conference. "But what if it was possible? What if you could integrate your data at the right time during the training of a frontier model, then create a proprietary model that was just for you?" Nova Forge employs what AWS calls "open training," which allows developers to blend their proprietary data with an Amazon-curated dataset at every step of model development, with checkpoints during training. AWS said this means models will not regress on foundational capabilities, such as instruction following, while learning company-specific knowledge and instructions. Each "Novella" could be a custom version of Nova 2 Lite, with Nova's full knowledge and reasoning power, but with domain-specificity. Right now, enterprises can only make Novellas from Nova 2 Lite, but many will expand to other Nova 2 models soon. Nova Forge also offers enterprises "reinforcement learning gyms." This allows them to train AI systems through their own environments with simulated scenarios to create smaller, faster models and access responsible AI toolkits. Once companies create their Novellas, they can bring them to Bedrock to build more applications and agents. One customer currently using Nova Forge is Reddit, which integrated its own data and community-specific knowledge into a model to build a moderation program. Nova Forge only works with Nova models, and AWS does not plan to bring in third-party open-source models hosted on Bedrock (for now). Nova 2 models in detail AWS said tens of thousands of companies now use its Nova models and the company expects the Nova 2 models to see the same adoption. "Nova 2 Lite delivers incredible price performance for many workloads that we actually see our customers wanting to deliver in production," Garman said. "We think Nova 2 Lite will be the workhorse for many companies, while Pro will be for more complex tasks and for when you need your agents to be great." In a press release, AWS said evaluations showed Nova 2 Lite performed "equal or better on 13 out of 15 benchmarks compared to Claude Haiku 4.5, equal or better on 11 out of 17 benchmarks compared to GPT-5 Mini and equal or better on 14 out of 18 benchmarks compared to Gemini Flash 2.5." Users can adjust how much Nova 2 Lite shows its step-by-step thinking to balance costs with depth. Nova Pro 2 also performed well in benchmark testing compared to Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This model works best for multi-document analysis, video reasoning, advanced math and agentic engineering tasks. AWS said in its press release that both Nova 2 Lite and Pro "have built-in grounding and code execution capabilities." Nova 2 Sonic, the speech-to-speech model, generates human-like conversations and now supports multiple languages. The updated model has a 1-million-token context window, with more expressive voices and higher accuracy. The company said Sonic can even switch topics mid-conversation. Nova 2 Omni handles "up to 750,000 words, hours of audio, long videos and hundred-page documents, simultaneously analyzing entire product catalogs, testimonials, brand guidelines and video libraries at once." "While there are no comparable models in the industry to Nova 2 Omni, it demonstrates strengths in public benchmarks of multimodal reasoning on documents, images, videos and audio, and can generate high-quality images similar to other leading image-generation models," AWS said in its release.

Amazon debuts Nova Forge and next-gen chips. Here's what to know

Why it matters: Amazon is trying to define itself as more than just a low-cost cloud provider to run other companies' models. Driving the news: Announced at its Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nova Forge allows companies to inject their own data at various stages of training. * Amazon says the feature offers enterprises custom AI models with more industry-specific knowledge. * Early customers include Booking.com, Cosine AI, Nimbus Therapeutics, Nomura Research Institute, OpenBabylon, Reddit and Sony. What they're saying: In an exclusive interview with Axios, AWS CEO Matt Garman said the company is delivering on an oft-expressed need. * "What I hear over and over and over again is 'What I would really love is a frontier agent or a frontier model that actually just understands my data,'" he said. State of play: AWS also announced the Nova 2 family of Amazon-designed models, including a smaller text-only model, a new speech model and Nova 2 Omni, a reasoning model that can process text, images, video and speech and output both text and images. * AWS also announced its entry into the agent space: Nova Act, currently in trials at Hertz and 1Password. By the numbers: The new AWS Trainium3-based servers can deliver roughly four times as much compute performance and energy efficiency, the company says. * Early customers include Anthropic and Ricoh. The big picture: Whereas it recently seemed as if OpenAI was running away with the AI race, Google -- and now Amazon -- are making the case that there is plenty of competition. * "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," Garman told Axios. "People are now realizing that Amazon has a great platform for AI." We'll have more from our interview with Garman in Wednesday's AI+ newsletter. Sign up here.

Frontier models enter new phase with customization - SiliconANGLE

Nova Forge aims to close AI's domain knowledge gap with customizable frontier models Artificial intelligence is maturing into a new phase -- one powered by customizable frontier models built for real-world domain expertise. Look no further for evidence of this shift than with Nova, Amazon Web Services Inc.'s in-house family of frontier AI models, which saw multiple updates rolled out on Tuesday. But to best understand the motivation behind these updates starts with acknowledging a persistent industry challenge, according to Rohit Prasad (pictured), senior vice president and head scientist of artificial general intelligence at AWS. "A frontier model comes out. Public benchmarks look great," Prasad told theCUBE. "And then the production reality sets in that when you try to build your applications, your workflows -- it doesn't meet your expectations quite a few times. There's a fundamental reason for that, [and it's] because the knowledge you have of your domain, your use cases, is not in the frontier model." Prasad spoke with John Furrier at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed Nova Forge's approach to customizable frontier models and the growing role of agents in next-generation AI systems. Frontier models often perform well on benchmarks, but fall short in real production because of a lack of domain-specific knowledge. Until now, there were only imperfect solutions, including starting with a closed model and fine-tuning it using approaches such as reinforcement learning, according to Prasad. Alternatively, companies could start with an open-weight model and make some progress, but once they add their own domain data without access to the original training data, the model becomes unstable, he added. "The third [option] is you go with a very expensive route ... which [is] you build your own, but that requires deep expertise, massive computing [and a] massive amount of data collection. All of that is prohibitive for most enterprises. This is why we challenged the team and said, 'Go invent this.'" That invention turned into Nova Forge, introduced as a way to let users build deeply customized variants of Nova models, according to Prasad. It was made possible by providing multiple checkpoints that users can adapt with their own data: pre-trained, mid-training and post-training. "[At] each of these model training stages, you can add your frontier data -- your proprietary data -- with one unique thing, which is [that] we are giving you access to Amazon-curated data to blend in," he said. "Then when you do that, the model maintains its general intelligence and becomes an expert in your domain." As the AWS team developed the system, customers and partners could collaborate and test it in real use cases, with promise showing itself early. For example, Reddit Inc. used it to build a sophisticated model that deeply understand the company's content moderation needs, according to Prasad. "They found that they used to use six bespoke models ... and then they got access to Forge and were able to build [one]," he said, pointing to Reddit dramatically simplifying its moderation stack. Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Amazon Fires Back at OpenAI and Google with New Nova Models and Nova Forge | AIM

Nova Forge, an open training capability that lets organisations build customised variants of Nova called Novellas. Amazon has added four new AI models to its Nova lineup, introduced a new way for companies to train their own custom versions, and launched a tool that helps build AI agents that can work inside web browsers, the company announced at re:Invent 2025 on Tuesday. The company said tens of thousands of customers are already using Nova models for tasks including content generation, multi-step automation, and agent development. The new Nova 2 family is designed to balance speed, cost, and reasoning performance across text, image, video, and speech inputs. Nova 2 Lite and Nova 2 Pro are built for reasoning-focused workloads with web grounding and code execution capabilities. Nova 2 Lite is built for everyday applications such as customer support and document processing. Amazon said the model is "equal or better" across most benchmark comparisons with Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5 Mini, and Gemini Flash 2.5. Nova 2 Pro, the company's most capable reasoning model, is intended for complex tasks like agentic coding, long-range planning, and multi-document analysis. It outperformed or equalled Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Pro Preview on a majority of benchmarks, according to Amazon. Nova 2 Sonic is a speech-to-speech model built for real-time conversational AI with support for long context interactions and integration with telephony and voice frameworks. Nova 2 Omni is a unified multimodal model that can process text, images, video, and audio while generating both text and images. Amazon said it can handle large-scale inputs such as product catalogues, long videos, and multi-format brand assets in a single workflow. Organisations including Cisco, Siemens, Sumo Logic, and Trellix are using Nova 2 models for applications such as threat detection, video understanding, and voice assistants. Amazon also introduced Nova Forge, an open training capability that lets organisations build customised variants of Nova, called "Novellas," by blending proprietary datasets with Nova's training stages. The service provides access to pre-trained, mid-trained, and post-trained checkpoints, allowing customers to integrate domain-specific knowledge throughout the training cycle. Amazon said the approach avoids the trade-offs of shallow fine-tuning or training from scratch. Nova Forge includes reinforcement learning environments ("gyms"), support for synthetic data-driven distillation to create smaller models, and a responsible AI toolkit. Customers can deploy their custom models on Amazon Bedrock. Early adopters include Booking.com, Reddit, Sony, Cosine AI, and Nomura Research Institute. Amazon also launched Nova Act, a service for building and deploying AI agents that automate actions in web browsers. Powered by a Nova 2 Lite variant, Nova Act has reached 90% reliability in early customer workflows, the company said. Nova Act uses reinforcement learning over thousands of simulated web tasks to improve its performance on UI-based actions such as CRM updates, website testing, and insurance form submissions. Customers can prototype agents using natural language in a no-code playground, refine them in tools like VS Code, and deploy them through AWS. Hertz, Sola Systems, 1Password, and Amazon's Project Kuiper team are among early users. Amazon's Leo satellite internet team also used Nova Act for test automation. The company said the system reduced test case creation from weeks of engineering effort to minutes.

AWS introduces Nova Forge for training bespoke 'Novella' frontier models - SiliconANGLE

AWS introduces Nova Forge for training bespoke 'Novella' frontier models Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced Nova Forge at AWS re:Invent, a first-of-its-kind service that allows enterprise organizations to train and build their own frontier AI models based on the company's Nova family. Nova itself is a set of multimodal foundation models developed and released by AWS, including the next-generation Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Pro and Nova 2 Omni, also unveiled today. As organizations seek to fine-tune or extend existing models, they face a growing challenge: the more proprietary data a model absorbs, the more likely it is to "forget" pieces of its original training. That regression can compromise core behaviors such as instruction following. According to AWS, what enterprises actually need is a way to create frontier-class models without risking erosion of those base capabilities. Amazon noted that what organizations need is the capability to build frontier models without the risk of regressing them. With Nova Forge, customers can do exactly that. The customized frontier models produced through the service are called "Novellas," a blend of enterprise data and Nova's frontier-level capabilities. The service offers exclusive access to checkpoints for pre-trained, mid-trained and post-trained Nova models. This allows customers to combine their data with curated Amazon datasets for optimal model training. Organizations can begin building Novellas with Nova 2 Lite, the smallest model in the lineup, designed for fast, cost-effective reasoning for everyday tasks. Nova Forge users can also gain early access to Nova 2 Pro and Nova 2 Omni, giving them a head start on building applications -- and larger, more capable Novellas -- as those models come online. Nova Forge introduces several powerful capabilities in addition to data-mixing. Customers can train AI in their existing environments, referred to as reinforcement learning "gyms," where models interact with synthetic data and simulated scenarios that mimic real-world use. Developers can also create smaller, faster distilled models that retain the intelligence of larger models at a lower cost. AWS has further bundled an AI safety toolkit that allows organizations to implement guardrails and policy-aligned controls. Companies such as Booking.com B.V., Cosine AI, Nimbus Therapeutics, Nomura Research Institute, OpenBabylon, Sony Group Corp. and Reddit Inc. have started developing custom models with Nova Forge to better serve their interests. "We're replacing a number of different models with a single, more accurate solution that makes moderation more efficient," said Chris Slowe, chief technology officer of Reddit. "The ability to replace multiple specialized ML workflows with one cohesive approach marks a shift in how we implement and scale AI across Reddit." Nova Forge is available today in the US East AWS Region, with availability in additional regions coming in the months ahead.

AWS expands Nova foundation models, adds multimodal support - SiliconANGLE

AWS expands Nova foundation models, adds multimodal support In conjunction with its announcement of Nova Forge, a platform for building customized variants of its Nova foundation models, Amazon Web Services Inc. today introduced four new artificial intelligence models under the Nova banner that expand AWS's generative AI offerings in multimodal reasoning, speech processing and user interface automation. . The additions to the Nova family are each designed for different levels of reasoning complexity and multimodal processing. Nova 2 Lite is described as a cost-efficient reasoning model intended for everyday workloads. It can process text, images and video, generating text outputs for tasks such as customer service chatbots, document analysis and business automation. The model allows users to control how much step-by-step reasoning it performs to achieve the needed balance of latency and accuracy. Lite includes built-in web grounding and code execution capabilities, enabling it to incorporate current information into its responses. AWS called the new Nova 2 Pro its most capable reasoning model. It supports text, images, video and speech inputs and is aimed at advanced tasks involving long-range planning, complex instructions or agentic coding. Like Lite, Pro includes web search and code execution features. It can also act as a "teacher" model for distillation, helping customers create smaller variants tailored to specific workloads. Nova 2 Sonic is a speech-to-speech model that unifies text and voice understanding and generation. It supports real-time conversational interactions in multiple languages while tasks run asynchronously in the background. Its 1-million-token context window is equivalent to about 75,000 lines of code or 1,500 pages of text. Sonic is built for interactive voice systems and integrates with Amazon Connect cloud contact center service, telephony partners and conversational AI frameworks. Nova 2 Omni is the first Nova model built for full multimodal generation. It supports text, image, video and speech inputs and can generate both text and images. The model is designed to handle large volumes of mixed-media input, such as lengthy documents, videos and audio files, in a single workflow. AWS said Omni eliminates the need to combine multiple specialized models. It can, for example, ingest entire product catalogs and produce multifaceted marketing campaigns from the contents. The new Nova 2 models are available now. Developers can prototype applications using Nova tools at nova.amazon.com/dev, and enterprises can deploy models on Amazon Bedrock with standard security, privacy and scalability controls.

AWS Nova 2 AI Models Launched At re:Invent 2025 As CEO Touts New Innovation

CEO Matt Garman's keynote at AWS re:Invent 2025 today focused on the launch of four new Nova AI models looking to shake up the AI industry. Here's what every AWS partner needs to know. Amazon Web Services launched four new AI models inside its Nova portfolio with the goal of taking AI training, price performance and AI customer opportunity to the next level. AWS CEO Matt Garman's keynote at AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas on Tuesday focused on the $132 billion cloud leader's new Nova 2 AI models: Lite, Pro, Sonic and Omni. Garman dubbed Nova 2 Lite as the most cost-effective reasoning model for everyday workloads on the market today. "Nova 2 Lite compares really favorably in industry benchmarks to models like Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5 Mini, and Gemini Flash 2.5," said Garman on stage in front of thousands of attendees at AWS re:Invent. "It's our new fast and cost-effective reasoning model suitable for broad set of workloads." [Related: AWS Partners 'Are The Lifeblood,' Says CEO Garman Ahead Of Channel Program Evolution] "Nova 2 Lite excels at things like instruction following, tool calling, generating code and extracting information from documents -- often matching or exceeding the performance that we see from these comparable models at an industry leading cost performance," said AWS' CEO. Garman said customers can use Nova 2 Lite for automating business process workflow, intelligent document processing and customer support, while also helping software developers with code generation, debugging, refactoring, and migrating systems. "We think that Amazon Nova 2 Lite is going to be a real work horse, and it's going to be really popular for a wide variety of use cases out there," Garman said. All of the Nova 2 models are now available inside AWS' AI platform Amazon Bedrock. AWS' new Nova 2 Pro AI model is being dubbed Amazon's most intelligent reasoning model that can process text, images, video, and speech to generate text. "Pro is our most intelligent reasoning model, and it's going to be great when you have those really complex workloads," said AWS' CEO. "In particular, we look at really important areas where you need your agents to be great, and that's where Nova 2 Pro really shines -- where skills like instruction following and agentic tool use are critical." Garman said Nova 2 Pro is ideal for highly complex tasks like agentic coding, long-range planning, and sophisticated problem-solving. He said the model can also serve as a "teacher" for knowledge distillation -- transferring its capabilities into smaller, more efficient "student" models for specific domains and use cases. "If you look at artificial analysis benchmarks in those areas, Nova 2 Pro delivers better absolute results compared to leading models like GPT 5.1, Google Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Sonnett 4.5," AWS CEO said. Nova 2 Sonic is Amazon's new speech-to-speech model that unifies text and speech understanding and generation for real-time, human-like conversational AI. "Sonic offers industry leading conversational quality at awesome price performance. With improved latency and significantly expanded language support, we think you're going to love it," Garman said, Nova 2 Sonic features expanded multilingual support with expressive voices, higher accuracy, and a one-million token context window for sustained interactions, while enabling seamless switching between voice and text. Nova 2 Omni is a unified multimodal reasoning and generation model that can process text, images, video, and speech inputs while generating both text and images -- an industry first, Garman said. "Omni is the industry's first reasoning model that supports text, image, video and audio input, and then it supports text and image generation output," Garman said. Nova 2 Omni handles up to 750,000 words, hours of audio, long videos, and hundred-page documents, simultaneously analyzing entire product catalogs, testimonials, brand guidelines, and video libraries at once. AWS said organizations like Cisco, Siemens, Sumo Logic, and Trellix are already using Nova 2 models for applications ranging from agentic threat detection to video understanding and voice AI assistants.

Amazon delves deeper into AI with launch of AI Factories, new Nova models and agent-building tools

Amazon Web Services (AMZN) has fully embraced the artificial intelligence revolution, launching its AI Factories and a new lineup of Nova models at re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas today. While AWS already offers the largest global network of AI infrastructure, it AWS AI Factories enable customers to run AWS AI in their own data centers using advanced hardware, accelerating deployment timelines by months or years and potentially reducing infrastructure investments for enterprises. The Nvidia NVLink Fusion collaboration allows AWS to unify scale-up architecture and custom silicon, simplifying AI platform deployment and management, and helps position AWS at the core of AI and compute capabilities. The Nova models and AgentCore enable clients to build, train, and deploy custom AI models and agents, boosting business process efficiency, content moderation, and secure application development across industries.

AWS Unveils Nova 2 Omni & Next-Gen AI Innovations at re: Invent 2025

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revealed one major AI advancement at its flagship event re:Invent. The tech giant has introduced new models, infrastructure, and tools designed to accelerate the development and deployment of AI. Revamping the AI landscape, AWS has released the long-awaited product: the new AI model, Nova 2 Omni. This innovation can handle text, speech, images, and videos simultaneously. The model, currently in preview, is part of the Nova family alongside Nova 2 Lite and Nova 2 Sonic. Nova 2 Omni can combine several AI models into one and access a wide range of applications across various industries.

Amazon Introduces Four New Frontier Nova Models, a Pioneering Nova Forge Service for Organizations to Build Their Own Models, and Nova Act for Building Reliable Browser Agents

Amazon announces a comprehensive expansion of its Nova portfolio with four new models, a pioneering "open training" service that empowers organizations to build their custom model variants with Nova, and a service for creating highly reliable AI agents. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is guided by customer obsession, pace of innovation, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. By democratizing technology for nearly two decades and making cloud computing and generative AI accessible to organizations of every size and industry, AWS has built one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses in history. Millions of customers trust AWS to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and shape the future. With the most comprehensive AI capabilities and global infrastructure footprint, AWS empowers builders to turn big ideas into reality. Learn more at aws.amazon.com and follow @AWSNewsroom.