Amazon Nova

What It Is

Amazon Nova is AWS's homegrown foundation model family. The Nova 2 generation, launched at re:Invent December 2025, includes four models: Lite (cost-effective reasoning, 1M context), Pro (complex multi-step tasks, still in Preview), Omni (multimodal reasoning across text, images, video, and speech), and Sonic (real-time speech-to-speech). All models run exclusively on Amazon Bedrock.

Why It Matters

Nova sits at Watch because the models are competitive on price-performance within the AWS ecosystem but aren't differentiated enough to pull teams away from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google. Nova 2 Lite at $0.30/M input tokens is genuinely cheap, and the Bedrock integration means zero additional infrastructure for AWS-native organisations.

The practical consideration: if your organisation already runs on AWS and needs cost-effective AI capabilities with integrated governance, Nova is worth evaluating. If you need frontier reasoning or coding performance, you're looking elsewhere.

Key Developments

• Dec 2025: Nova 2 family launched at re:Invent — Lite, Pro (Preview), Omni, Sonic.
• Dec 2025: Nova Forge announced for customers to build custom frontier models on AWS infrastructure.
• Dec 2025: Nova Act announced for browser-based UI workflow automation (computer use).
• Dec 2025: Nova Multimodal Embeddings — first unified model for text, documents, images, video, and audio.

What to Watch

Pro leaving Preview and reaching GA is the key milestone. If Nova 2 Pro matches Gemini 2.5 Pro on reasoning and coding when it reaches production, the combination of AWS integration and competitive pricing makes a strong case for Bedrock-native teams. Watch for third-party benchmarks — AWS's own comparisons should be treated with healthy scepticism.