# Amazon Nova (model family)
Amazon Nova is a family of first-party foundation models made by [Amazon Web Services](https://www.edgepedia.org/amazon-web-services) (AWS) and served through its [Amazon Bedrock](https://www.edgepedia.org/amazon-bedrock) platform, announced at AWS re:Invent on December 3, 2024.[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models) The family spans text-understanding models in three capability tiers (Micro, Lite, and Pro), a flagship tier (Premier), image generation (Canvas), video generation (Reel), and speech models (Sonic), with a second generation, Nova 2, added in December 2025.[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models) • [2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/) This article covers the model family, not Amazon the company or its consumer products.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Announced | December 3, 2024, at AWS re:Invent[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models) |
| Launch models | Micro, Lite, Pro (generally available), Premier (Q1 2025), Canvas, Reel[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models) |
| Context windows | Premier 1M tokens; Pro and Lite 300K; Micro 128K[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) |
| Input modalities | Text (Micro); text, image, and video (Lite, Pro, Premier)[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) |
| Output limit | Up to 10K output tokens across all four understanding models[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) |
| Fine-tuning | Supported on Pro, Lite, and Micro; not on Premier[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) |
| Second generation | Nova 2 announced December 2, 2025 (Lite GA, Pro preview)[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/) |
| Open weights | None; all models are served via Bedrock only[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) |
## Release timeline and versions
At re:Invent on December 3, 2024, Amazon announced six models. Nova Micro is a text-only model positioned for the lowest latency at very low cost; Nova Lite is a low-cost multimodal model for image, video, and text input; Nova Pro is a multimodal model balancing accuracy, speed, and cost; Nova Premier, described as the most capable multimodal model and a teacher for distilling custom models, was slated for Q1 2025; Nova Canvas generates images and Nova Reel generates video.[4](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-nova-artificial-intelligence-bedrock-aws) Micro, Lite, and Pro were available to AWS customers that day, while Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said onstage that Premier would arrive in early 2025.[5](https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/03/amazon-announces-nova-a-new-family-of-multimodal-ai-models/)
Premier arrived on April 30, 2025, reaching general availability in Bedrock with a 1M-token context length and text, image, and video input (no audio), initially in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and [US West](https://www.edgepedia.org/us-west) (Oregon) via cross-region inference.[6](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-nova-premier-our-most-capable-model-for-complex-tasks-and-teacher-for-model-distillation/) A dedicated Premier technical report and model card was published the same day as an addendum to the December 2024 family report.[7](https://www.amazon.science/publications/amazon-nova-premier-technical-report-and-model-card)
Later in 2025, Amazon added a unified Nova embedding model for retrieval across text, documents, images, video, and audio (October 2025, per a third-party timeline).[8](https://hidekazu-konishi.com/entry/amazon_nova_model_release_timeline.html) At re:Invent on December 2, 2025, Amazon announced the Nova 2 generation: Nova 2 Lite, a reasoning model with a 1M-token context window, generally available, and Nova 2 Pro in preview.[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/) • [8](https://hidekazu-konishi.com/entry/amazon_nova_model_release_timeline.html) The speech line also expanded: Nova Sonic is documented as supporting five languages (US and UK English, French, Italian, German, Spanish) with bidirectional streaming,[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) while the 2026 Nova 2 Sonic page describes a speech-to-speech model supporting seven languages, polyglot voices, cross-modal voice-and-text switching, asynchronous tool use, and up to a 1M-token context.[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/)
## Architecture and training as published
The family's technical report and model card, originally published December 3, 2024,[9](https://www.amazon.science/publications/the-amazon-nova-family-of-models-technical-report-and-model-card) states that Nova Pro, Lite, and Micro are Transformer-based and were pretrained on multilingual and multimodal data curated from over 200 languages, with particular emphasis on fifteen named languages including English, Japanese, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese.[10](https://arxiv.org/html/2506.12103v1) Training data combined licensed, proprietary, open-source, and publicly available sources; after pretraining, the models went through supervised fine-tuning, reward-model training, and alignment via direct preference optimization (DPO) and proximal policy optimization (PPO).[10](https://arxiv.org/html/2506.12103v1)
The generative media models use a different architecture: Canvas and Reel are latent diffusion models in which a variational autoencoder maps image or video frames to latent variables on which the diffusion process operates, with text-encoder conditioning and two training phases (pretraining and fine-tuning).[10](https://arxiv.org/html/2506.12103v1)
Disclosure is limited. The technical report gives no parameter counts for any Nova model,[10](https://arxiv.org/html/2506.12103v1) and at launch AWS declined to specify its exact training data, telling [TechCrunch](https://www.edgepedia.org/techcrunch) only that it is a combination of proprietary and licensed data.[5](https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/03/amazon-announces-nova-a-new-family-of-multimodal-ai-models/)
## Benchmarks: vendor claims versus independent measurement
Every Nova benchmark figure in the public record is vendor-reported. At launch, Amazon said Nova Micro was equal or better than Meta Llama 3.1 8B on all 11 applicable benchmarks and Google Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B on all 12, with a claimed output speed of 210 tokens per second.[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models) Nova Lite was reported equal or better on 17 of 19 benchmarks versus GPT-4o mini, 17 of 21 versus Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B, and 10 of 12 versus Claude Haiku 3.5.[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models) Nova Pro was reported equal or better on 17 of 20 benchmarks versus GPT-4o, 16 of 21 versus [Gemini 1.5 Pro](https://www.edgepedia.org/gemini-1-5-pro), and 9 of 20 versus Claude Sonnet 3.5v2.[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models)
For Premier, Amazon reported evaluation across 17 benchmarks and claimed it is the most capable Nova model, comparable to the best non-reasoning models in the industry and equal or better on approximately half of same-tier comparisons.[6](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-nova-premier-our-most-capable-model-for-complex-tasks-and-teacher-for-model-distillation/) The evidence retrieved for this article includes no independent evaluation, leaderboard or audit of Nova; the vendor's claims have not been corroborated by a third-party source here, and the same-tier "equal or better on roughly half" framing is Amazon's own characterization.
## By the numbers
- Context windows: Premier 1M tokens; Pro and Lite 300K tokens (about 30 minutes of video processing at launch); Micro 128K tokens.[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) • [1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models)
- Output: up to 10K output tokens for all four understanding models, which also support 200+ languages.[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html)
- Speed: Amazon claimed 210 output tokens per second for Nova Micro at launch.[1](https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models)
- [Distillation](https://www.edgepedia.org/distillation): Amazon reported that a Nova Pro model distilled from Premier achieved 20% higher accuracy on API invocations versus the base model, while matching the teacher's performance with Pro's speed and cost.[6](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-nova-premier-our-most-capable-model-for-complex-tasks-and-teacher-for-model-distillation/)
- Adoption: According to AWS, over 50,000 customers use Amazon Nova models.[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/)
Pricing is not covered by the sources retrieved for this article, so no per-million-token comparison with GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, or [Llama](https://www.edgepedia.org/llama-model-family) can be made here.
## Availability, fine-tuning and licensing
All four understanding models support the Converse and Invoke APIs, streaming, batch inference, Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Agents, and Studio; Guardrails and Evaluations are text-only for Premier and Pro.[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) Regional availability differs by tier: Pro and Lite are documented across five regions including Tokyo, Sydney, and London, while Premier is documented as available only in US East (N. Virginia) and AWS GovCloud (US-West), although the launch blog lists three US regions via cross-region inference; the sources do not reconcile this difference.[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) • [6](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-nova-premier-our-most-capable-model-for-complex-tasks-and-teacher-for-model-distillation/)
Nova Pro, Lite, and Micro support fine-tuning; Premier does not, and instead serves as a distillation teacher for those three models.[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html) Nova 2 Lite extends customization across pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement fine-tuning via Bedrock and SageMaker, including use with Amazon Nova Forge.[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/) There is no open-weight variant: every Nova model is served through Bedrock.[3](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html)
## What changed in 2025–2026
The family's center of gravity shifted from the original understanding tiers toward reasoning, speech, and agentic use. Premier's April 2025 arrival gave Amazon a flagship positioned as comparable to the best non-reasoning industry models (a vendor claim),[6](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-nova-premier-our-most-capable-model-for-complex-tasks-and-teacher-for-model-distillation/) and the October 2025 embedding model extended the family to retrieval.[8](https://hidekazu-konishi.com/entry/amazon_nova_model_release_timeline.html) Nova 2 Lite, generally available from December 2, 2025, is a reasoning model with developer controls for thinking effort, built-in code interpreter and web grounding, remote MCP tool support, and a 1M-token context window.[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/) Nova 2 Sonic pushes the speech line toward unified speech-to-speech interaction with tool use, and Nova 2 Pro remained in preview as of the vendor's 2026 pages.[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/) On adoption, AWS's stated figure of over 50,000 Nova customers is the only number available.[2](https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/)
## References
1. Introducing Amazon Nova: A New Generation of Foundation Models (Amazon press release) — https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/12/introducing-amazon-nova-a-new-generation-of-foundation-models
2. Generative foundation model – Amazon Nova foundation models – AWS — https://aws.amazon.com/nova/models/
3. What is Amazon Nova? (AWS Bedrock documentation) — https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/what-is-nova.html
4. Amazon Nova: Meet our new foundation models in Amazon Bedrock — https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-nova-artificial-intelligence-bedrock-aws
5. Amazon announces Nova, a new family of multimodal AI models (TechCrunch) — https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/03/amazon-announces-nova-a-new-family-of-multimodal-ai-models/
6. Amazon Nova Premier: Our most capable model for complex tasks and teacher for model distillation (AWS News Blog) — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-nova-premier-our-most-capable-model-for-complex-tasks-and-teacher-for-model-distillation/
7. Amazon Nova Premier: Technical report and model card (Amazon Science) — https://www.amazon.science/publications/amazon-nova-premier-technical-report-and-model-card
8. Amazon Nova Model Release Timeline — https://hidekazu-konishi.com/entry/amazon_nova_model_release_timeline.html
9. The Amazon Nova family of models: Technical report and model card (Amazon Science) — https://www.amazon.science/publications/the-amazon-nova-family-of-models-technical-report-and-model-card
10. The Amazon Nova Family of Models: Technical Report and Model Card — https://arxiv.org/html/2506.12103v1
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Computing and digital systems › Modern AI: foundation models, generative AI, and the AI industry › Model families and named models › Large language model families › Proprietary model families*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license