Amazon Nova is Amazon's first-party foundation-model family, launched March 31, 2025. Its release marked Amazon positioning itself as a direct model provider rather than only a host for third-party models through its AWS Bedrock marketplace.
Capabilities and components
Amazon launched the Nova family on March 31, 2025, alongside the consumer-facing site nova.amazon.com and Amazon Nova Act, an agentic AI system. The Nova Foundation Models are multimodal, spanning text, image, and video generation. Nova Act is an agentic layer built on top of the foundation models, targeted at developer and enterprise automation.
Availability
Nova models are available through AWS Bedrock and nova.amazon.com.
Positioning
The launch presented Amazon as a first-party AI model provider rather than only a Bedrock host for other developers' models. Bedrock combined with Amazon's investment in Anthropic had previously been the public account of Amazon's AI stack; Nova adds a parallel in-house model line developed alongside that investment.
Amazon's approach can be compared with how other large technology companies sourced frontier models as of early 2026. Apple contracted externally, agreeing to a deal with Google's Gemini in January 2026. Amazon both invested in Anthropic and built Nova in parallel. Microsoft invested in OpenAI while also offering rented access through Azure AI Foundry. Meta built in-house with Llama and its Superintelligence Labs. Google built in-house with Gemini and its TPU hardware.
Related models
- developer: Amazon
- deployed-on: AWS Bedrock, nova.amazon.com
- related: Anthropic (parallel Amazon investment); GSA OneGov Program and USAi Platform (August 2025) ($1B AWS OneGov deal); AI Acquihires (Adept absorption context).
Sources
- Amazon / Nova + Nova Act announcement (2025-03-31)