Amazon and the Nova models: the cloud giant's in-house AI

A retail and cloud giant that builds its own models

Amazon, founded in Seattle in 1994, is known to consumers for its online store and Alexa devices, and to businesses for AWS, its cloud division. It is mainly through AWS that Amazon distributes its AI models. According to the company, the Amazon Nova family was built on AI technology first developed for Amazon’s own internal applications.

Amazon’s strategy differs from that of OpenAI or Anthropic: rather than betting on a single flagship model, AWS offers a broad catalog of models from several providers in Amazon Bedrock, its own included.

Nova models and services

Amazon’s documentation describes the Nova 2 generation, with understanding and reasoning models, multimodal models and a voice model. At the time of review, the official page highlights:

• Nova 2 Lite, a fast, cost-effective reasoning model for everyday tasks;
• Nova 2 Sonic, a speech-to-speech conversational voice model.

Two services round out the offering:

• Nova Act, to build fleets of AI agents that automate tasks in web interfaces, a form of computer use;
• Nova Forge, to build a custom model from Nova and your own data.

The lineup has been reshuffled several times since Nova launched, and some models once in the spotlight no longer are. In practice, the Bedrock console is the reference for what is actually available.

Closed models, accessed through the cloud

Amazon does not publish the weights of its Nova models: unlike open-weight models, you cannot install them on your own servers. Access goes through the Amazon Bedrock API with an AWS account, and the documentation lives at docs.aws.amazon.com/nova. For a company already on AWS, the appeal is integration: security, billing and data all stay in the same environment.

To compare Nova with other models on the market, use our model comparison tool or browse the list of AI labs.