After nearly two years of speculation about when—or even if—Amazon would launch its own competitive family of AI models to challenge OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, the company finally delivered a mic drop moment at its AWS re:Invent conference. Amazon announced a new family of AI models for text, images and video, called Amazon Nova, that it claimed have “state-of-the-art intelligence” across many tasks, are 75% cheaper than top-performing industry competitors.
The question on many Amazon-watchers minds, however, was: Why? After all, Amazon has invested $8 billion into Anthropic, including an additional $4 billion announced just last week. As part of the deal, Anthropic has also committed to using Amazon’s AWS cloud and Amazon’s custom AI computer chip, called Trainium, to train and run its models.
