Amazon to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for $100,000 a year

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a groundbreaking service called Nova Forge, enabling cloud clients to tailor generative AI models during the training phase. This innovative offering comes at an annual cost of $100,000, allowing organizations to integrate their own data into the training process much earlier than before. Previously, companies could only fine-tune large language models after their completion. With Nova Forge, the emphasis is on leveraging customer-provided data, potentially enhancing the effectiveness of the models. Customers will also have the capability to refine open-weight models, although they will need to supply their own training data and computing resources. AWS asserts that using Nova Forge could be significantly more cost-effective compared to developing proprietary models, which could require hundreds of millions or even billions in investment. Despite launching its own models under the Nova brand in 2024, AWS models have not yet gained significant traction among developers. A recent survey from Menlo Ventures indicated that Amazon-backed Anthropic commands a 32% market share for enterprise large language models, while OpenAI follows with 25%, Google at 20%, and Meta at 9%; AWS's Nova models hold less than 5%. Available through AWS's Bedrock service, Nova models are designed to operate on Amazon's cloud infrastructure alongside models from Anthropic. Rohit Prasad, Amazon's chief scientist for artificial general intelligence, emphasized the customer-centric approach of their innovation during a CNBC interview, stating, "Our customers wanted it. We have invented on their behalf to make this happen." Nova Forge is already being utilized internally by Amazon for various projects, including enhancing the Alexa AI assistant and improving store operations. Notably, Reddit has successfully employed a Nova model enhanced with its own data for content moderation, outperforming existing commercial models. Other organizations, such as Booking.com, Nimbus Therapeutics, the Nomura Research Institute, and Sony, are also leveraging Nova Forge to create tailored AI solutions. While organizations can seek assistance from Amazon engineers in building their models, this support is not included in the annual fee. At this week’s Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, AWS is unveiling new models for developers, including Nova 2 Pro, a reasoning model that matches or exceeds the performance of prominent models like Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 and OpenAI's GPT-5. Nova 2 Pro will be accessible to AWS customers with Forge subscriptions in early access. Moreover, Nova 2 Omni, another innovative reasoning model, boasts the capability to process multiple types of media, including images and text, marking it as the first of its kind with such versatile functionality. AWS aims to reduce both costs and complexity for organizations looking to integrate AI into their applications. With tens of thousands of organizations utilizing Nova models weekly, AWS continues to expand its influence in the AI landscape.