Amazon Nova
By Amazon Web Services
Amazon Nova is a family of foundation models built by AWS and offered through Amazon Bedrock, spanning text, multimodal understanding, image generation, and video generation, first announced at AWS re:Invent in December 2024.
Definition
Amazon Nova is a family of foundation models built by AWS and offered through Amazon Bedrock, spanning text, multimodal understanding, image generation, and video generation, first announced at AWS re:Invent in December 2024.
Overview
Amazon Nova was introduced as AWS's own first-party foundation model family, intended to give Bedrock customers a cost-competitive, tightly integrated alternative to third-party models like Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, or Mistral models already available on the platform. The initial Nova lineup included understanding models — Nova Micro (text-only, lowest latency), Nova Lite (low-cost multimodal), and Nova Pro (balanced multimodal accuracy, speed, and cost) — plus Nova Premier, a more capable model positioned for complex reasoning and as a teacher model for distillation, and creative models Nova Canvas (image generation) and Nova Reel (video generation). AWS positioned Nova models around price-performance rather than pushing frontier benchmark leadership, emphasizing lower cost per token and latency advantages for high-volume enterprise workloads such as customer service, document processing, and content moderation. The Nova Pro and Nova Lite models support multimodal input (text, image, and video), and later updates added agentic capabilities and Nova Act, a model and SDK aimed specifically at browser-based agentic automation tasks. Because Nova is built and served natively within Amazon Bedrock, it benefits from tight integration with AWS's broader AI stack, including Bedrock Guardrails, Bedrock Knowledge Bases for retrieval-augmented generation, and Bedrock Agents, making it attractive for enterprises already committed to the AWS ecosystem. Nova competes with other major cloud providers' first-party model strategies — Google's Gemini on Vertex AI and Microsoft's investment in OpenAI on Azure — as well as with third-party models available on the same Bedrock marketplace, giving AWS customers an in-house option without leaving the platform.
Key Features
- Tiered lineup: Nova Micro, Lite, Pro, and Premier for text and multimodal understanding
- Dedicated creative models: Nova Canvas for image generation and Nova Reel for video generation
- Nova Act model and SDK for browser-based agentic automation
- Native integration with Amazon Bedrock, Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, and Agents
- Emphasis on price-performance and low latency over raw benchmark leadership
- Multimodal input support (text, image, video) in Lite and Pro tiers
- Nova Premier positioned as a teacher model for distillation into smaller custom models