AWS unveils new chips, AI features and enhanced cloud offerings at re:Invent

Cloud computing experts, customers and technology enthusiasts have descended on Las Vegas to attend the event that runs through December 1

AWS reported $23.1 billion in revenue in the September quarter. AP

Amazon Web Services has announced the creation of faster chips, the latest generative artificial intelligence capabilities to increase productivity and the general availability of Amazon S3 express one zone – its latest high-performance cloud storage service – to boost its portfolio as it wrestles with companies like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP to increase its market share.

“The cloud is for everyone … customers of all sizes, all industries and from all regions are using AWS cloud,” Adam Selipsky, chief executive of AWS, said at the company’s annual re: Invent event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Leading enterprises are using AWS cloud. Our clients come from various industries including financial services, health care and automotive.”

Cloud computing experts, customers and technology enthusiasts have descended on Las Vegas to attend the event, which runs through December 1.

The new Amazon S3 express one zone is the lowest latency cloud object storage available and customers can also scale their storage up or down as needed.

It offers data access speed up to 10 times faster and costs up to 50 per cent less than Amazon S3 standard, Mr Selipsky said.

Amazon S3, which was launched 17 years ago, is one of the most popular cloud storage service, with millions of customers around the world. It holds more than 350 trillion objects and averages more than 100 million requests per second.

It is well-suited for emerging use cases – such as machine learning and AI training, interactive analytics, financial model simulations, real-time advertising and media content creation – that require writing and gaining access to data millions of times per minute.

Amazon S3 express one zone aims to deliver the “fastest data access speed for the most latency-sensitive applications and enable customers to make millions of requests per minute for their highly accessed data sets”, while also reducing request and compute costs, said James Kirschner, general manager of Amazon S3 at AWS.

AWS, the world's biggest cloud services provider, had good momentum in sales in the September quarter. Its revenue reached $23.1 billion in the third quarter of the year, rising annually by more than 12.2 per cent.

The company also announced the next generation of two AWS-designed chip families – AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2. The new chips intend to deliver “advancements in price performance and energy efficiency” for a range of customer workloads, including ML training and generative AI applications.

Graviton4 provides up to 30 per cent better computing performance and 75 per cent more memory bandwidth than the current generation Graviton3 processors.

It marks the fourth generation of chips by AWS in five years and is the “most powerful and energy efficient chip the company has ever built” for a broad range of workloads, AWS said.

While Trainium2 is designed to deliver up to four times faster training than the first-generation Trainium chips. It can train foundation models and large language models in a fraction of the time, while improving energy efficiency up to two times, AWS said.

“Silicon underpins every customer workload, making it a critical area of innovation for AWS,” said David Brown, vice president of compute and networking at AWS.

“By focusing our chip designs on real workloads that matter to customers, we are able to deliver the most advanced cloud infrastructure to them.”

The 12th annual re: Invent event features speeches, innovation talks, builder labs, workshops, demos and service announcements. Nearly 50,000 attendees are attending it in person, while 300,000 are following the event online.

AWS also announced new generative AI capabilities in Amazon Connect – the company’s cloud contact centre that enables organisations to deliver better customer experiences at lower costs.

Powered by large language models, the new features aim to transform how companies provide customer service, AWS said.

For example, Amazon Q in Connect will provide agents with recommended responses and actions based on real-time customer questions, for faster, more accurate customer support.

Amazon Connect contact lens helps to identify the essential parts of call centre conversations with AI-generated summaries that detect sentiment, trends and policy compliance.

Another feature Amazon Lex enables contact centre administrators to create new chatbots and interactive voice response systems in hours by using natural-language prompts. It could improve existing systems by generating responses to commonly asked questions.

The contact centre industry is poised to be “fundamentally transformed by generative AI”, offering customer service agents new ways to deliver personalised customer experiences, said Pasquale DeMaio, vice president of Amazon Connect at AWS applications.

“Yet few organisations have the advanced machine learning expertise to easily harness this technology and apply it to their operations.”

The company also announced Amazon Q, a new type of generative AI-powered assistant tailored to provide actionable information in real time to “streamline tasks, speed decision making, and spark creativity, built with rock-solid security and privacy”, Mr Selipsky said.