Amazon Nova family
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-nova-artificial-intelligence-bedrock-aws
Amazon's first-party foundation model family, launched at AWS re:Invent Dec-2024. Nova Pro (multimodal mid-tier), Nova Lite (multimodal cheap), Nova Micro (text-only fast), Nova Canvas (image gen), Nova Reel (video gen). Premier frontier-tier launched 2025. Substrate for AWS Bedrock-native agents and Amazon Q. Distinct from Claude / Llama / Mistral hosted via Bedrock — Nova is Amazon's own training.
Active · Verified 2026-10-31 · fresh as of 2026-10-31 · 33 cited facts, 0 with a third-party source · 2 recorded changes · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- AWS-native foundation model family (Nova Pro / Lite / Micro / Premier / Canvas / Reel) vendor fix
- Tier
- T2
- Latest release
- Nova 2.5 Sonic speech-to-speech (2026-10); Nova 2 Lite reasoning model (2025-12-02) is newest text model on Bedrock vendor fix
- License
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo fix
- Pricing
- AWS Bedrock pay-per-token: Nova Micro $0.035/$0.14 per 1M; Lite $0.06/$0.24; Pro $0.80/$3.20; Premier $2.50/$12.50 vendor fix
- Funding
- Amazon (AMZN) public; ~$2T market cap; capex $100B+ 2025 (largest among hyperscalers) vendor fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-31 fix
- Layer
- large-models repo fix
- Licensing
- commercial vendor fix
When to use
Optimised for: AWS-native enterprise; cheap multimodal at Lite / Micro tier; integration with Amazon Q + Alexa+
Anti-fit: not for self-hosting (weights closed); AWS-locked deployment; benchmark performance trails Claude / GPT / Gemini at the frontier tier
Pros & cons
Pros
AWS distribution to massive existing enterprise base; cheapest multimodal at Lite / Micro tier (75% vendor-claimed); native integration with Amazon Q + Alexa+; FedRAMP High via AWS GovCloud.
Cons
Lags frontier tier on most benchmarks; AWS-only deployment; closed weights; Amazon AGI team newer than DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic; Premier tier still maturing.
Claims & capabilities
Nova Pro multimodal mid-tier 300k ctx; Nova Premier frontier 2025; trained by Amazon AGI team Seattle / Bellevue; AWS Bedrock-native pricing 75% cheaper than peers (Amazon-stated for Lite/Micro)
Technical surface
- API surface
- AWS Bedrock REST/SDK (Python / TS / Java / Go / .NET); SigV4 auth
- Backend storage
- not applicable — substrate foundation model
- Deployment
- Managed-only — Amazon Bedrock (custom Nova models also deployable via SageMaker Inference); weights closed
- Embedding model
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Multi-tenancy
- not applicable — substrate foundation model
- MCP
- not applicable — substrate foundation model
- A2A
- not applicable — substrate foundation model
- OpenTelemetry
- not applicable — substrate foundation model
Similar systems
Other foundation models (substrate reference) in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
- Anthropic Claude (foundation models) T1
Claude family of frontier foundation models — Sonnet 4 (workhorse), Opus 4.5 (frontier capability), Haiku 4.5 (fast/cheap). Frontier model used as substrate by Claude Code, Anthropic Memory tool, Cline, Aider, Continue.dev, Cursor, Goose, and dozens of other catalog entries. Memory in Claude is parametric (in weights) — discrete episodic memory lives outside the model in the Claude Memory tool (see Platform-provider memory section).
- OpenAI GPT family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4) T1
OpenAI's foundation model family — GPT-5 (2025-08 flagship), GPT-4o (multimodal workhorse), o3/o4 reasoning series. Substrate for ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, Microsoft Copilot, Azure OpenAI, and many downstream agents in this catalog (Devin, Codex CLI, Operator, Cursor mode). Parametric memory in weights; discrete user memory ships in ChatGPT Memory feature (separate row).
- Google Gemini 3 family T1
Google DeepMind's Gemini 3 frontier model family — Gemini 3 Pro (top tier), 3 Flash (fast), 3 Nano (on-device). Substrate for Google Workspace AI, Vertex AI Agent Platform, Gemini Code Assist, Project Mariner, and Project Astra. Multimodal-native; 1M-10M context window. Largest context window of any frontier model. Used by Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform Memory Bank (separate row).
- Mistral Large 2 / Mixtral family T1
French frontier-model lab (Paris). Family includes Mistral Large 2 (123B dense, Jul-2024), Mixtral 8x22B (open-weights MoE), Mistral Small 3 (24B, open-weights Jan-2025), Codestral (code specialist). EU-headquartered alternative to US/China model labs; GDPR-friendly data residency. Distinct from the Mistral Le Chat memory feature (already in catalog) — this row covers the model family itself as substrate.
- xAI Grok 4 T1
Elon Musk's xAI frontier model — Grok 4 launched 2025-07. Trained on Colossus (100k+ GPU supercluster in Memphis). Deeply integrated with X/Twitter (real-time tweet data access). Grok 4 Heavy variant for premium tier. No frontier-tier open-weights — Grok 1 (314B MoE) is the only weight release. The x.ai site now brands itself SpaceXSI (page title, checked 2026-10-29).
- Cohere Command R+ / Command A T1
Toronto-based foundation-model lab (Aidan Gomez, ex-Google Brain 'Attention Is All You Need' co-author). Command family is enterprise / RAG-optimised: Command A (Mar-2025, 111B dense, 256k ctx), Command R+ (104B MoE), Command R7B (smallest tier). Announced merger with Aleph Alpha April-2026. Open weights via CC-BY-NC (non-commercial); Cohere-hosted for commercial.
Sources (32 cited facts, 0 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is AWS-native foundation model family (Nova Pro / Lite / Micro / Premier / Canvas / Reel) vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Amazon's first-party foundation model family, launched at AWS re:Invent Dec-2024. Nova P… vendor
- Claims / benefits Nova Pro multimodal mid-tier 300k ctx; Nova Premier frontier 2025; trained by Amazon AGI… vendor
- Modalities text, image (in + out via Canvas), video (out via Reel), code vendor
- Created 2024-12 (Nova family launched at re:Invent); 2025 (Nova Premier) vendor
- Latest release Nova 2.5 Sonic speech-to-speech (2026-10); Nova 2 Lite reasoning model (2025-12-02) is n… vendor
- Mindshare AWS Bedrock distribution → broad enterprise reach; less developer mindshare than Claude … vendor
- Funding Amazon (AMZN) public; ~$2T market cap; capex $100B+ 2025 (largest among hyperscalers) vendor
- Customers / scale AWS Bedrock customers (broad enterprise base); native to Amazon Q Developer + Q Business… vendor
- Pricing AWS Bedrock pay-per-token: Nova Micro $0.035/$0.14 per 1M; Lite $0.06/$0.24; Pro $0.80/$… vendor
- Compliance SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001/17/18, HIPAA (Bedrock BAA), FedRAMP High (AWS GovCloud), PCI DS… vendor
- Data handling Never trains on Bedrock customer data; Amazon Bedrock data residency controls + KMS encr… vendor
- Deployment Managed-only — Amazon Bedrock (custom Nova models also deployable via SageMaker Inferenc… vendor
- HQ Seattle / Bellevue, US (Amazon AGI org) vendor
- Founders / pedigree Amazon AGI org under Rohit Prasad (SVP Amazon AGI; ex-Alexa AI head) vendor
- Performance MMLU: Nova Premier ~85%; Nova Pro ~80%; vendor-stated 75% cheaper than peer mid-tier for… vendor
- API surface AWS Bedrock REST/SDK (Python / TS / Java / Go / .NET); SigV4 auth vendor
- LLM lock single-vendor (AWS Bedrock-only) vendor
- Runtimes any (HTTP via AWS Bedrock SDK) vendor
- Validated verticals AWS enterprise customer base (financial / health / public sector / retail); Amazon Q Dev… vendor
- Time to running <30min (AWS Bedrock model access + IAM) vendor
- Anti-fit not for self-hosting (weights closed); AWS-locked deployment; benchmark performance trai… vendor
- Optimised for AWS-native enterprise; cheap multimodal at Lite / Micro tier; integration with Amazon Q … vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure AWS Bedrock (distribution); Amazon Q Developer / Q Business; Alexa+; Trainium/Inferentia… vendor
- Pros AWS distribution to massive existing enterprise base; cheapest multimodal at Lite / Micr… vendor
- Cons Lags frontier tier on most benchmarks; AWS-only deployment; closed weights; Amazon AGI t… vendor
- Project & sources www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-nova-foundation-models vendor
- capability-benchmark-sources swe-bench-verified: 70.0% (Nova 2 Pro, with inference-time scaling and internal agentic … vendor
- architecture-deployment-locus cloud vendor
- licensing-bucket commercial vendor
- positioning-platform-vs-product platform vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup large-models repo
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
- 2026-10-29
- Homepage “https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-nova-foundation-models” → “https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-nova-artificial-intelligence-bedrock-aws”
- 2026-10-26
- Latest release “Nova Premier (2025); Nova Pro / Lite / Micro / Canvas / Reel (2024-12)” → “Nova 2.5 Sonic speech-to-speech (2026-10); Nova 2 Lite reasoning model (2025-12-02) is newest text model on Bedrock” source
- Deployment “Managed-only via AWS Bedrock; no self-hosting (weights closed)” → “Managed-only — Amazon Bedrock (custom Nova models also deployable via SageMaker Inference); weights closed” source
Related systems
References (1)
- Bedrock AgentCore (AWS) depends on at runtime — adjacent-infrastructure cell: AWS Bedrock (distribution); Amazon Q Developer / Q Business; Alexa+; Trainium/Inferentia chips
Referenced by (5)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — LangChain docs have an Amazon Nova chat model integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LiteLLM integrates with — LiteLLM docs have an Amazon Nova provider page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LiveKit Agents integrates with — LiveKit Agents docs have a Amazon Nova family model plugin page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenRouter integrates with — OpenRouter lists Amazon Nova as an inference provider (providers API slug "amazon-nova"). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Strands Agents (AWS) integrates with — Strands Agents docs have an Amazon Nova model provider page. (verified 2026-10-29)