Amazon.com Inc (AMZN  ) shares are trading higher Tuesday. Amazon Web Services made a slew of announcements at its re:Invent 2024 conference, including the general availability of Trainium2, new database capabilities, Bedrock updates and new foundation models. Here's what you need to know.

What To Know: Amazon's biggest conference of the year, AWS re:Invent 2024, kicked off this week with sessions set to run through Friday.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman on Tuesday gave his first keynote since taking the helm of AWS in June. The company announced the general availability of its Trainium2 chip and brought Benoit Dupin, senior director of machine learning and AI at Apple Inc , on stage.

Amazon and Apple have been working together for years. Dupin highlighted some of the success the companies have shared and suggested on stage that Apple will use Amazon's Trainium2 chip to pre-train its models, per CNBC.

Amazon said its Trainium2 chip offers 30% to 40% better price performance than the current generation and is purpose-built to support the largest generative AI workloads for both training and inference.

Amazon also announced new features that make Amazon S3 Tables the first cloud object store with fully managed support for Apache Iceberg for faster analytics. The new features also include the ability to automatically generate queryable metadata, helping to simplify data discovery.

Amazon further introduced new capabilities for Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB to support customers' demanding workloads. Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native relational database that delivers the performance and capability of a high-end commercial database, with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of an open-source database.

Amazon also announced new capabilities for its AI building and scaling service Amazon Bedrock that helps customers prevent factual errors, direct multiple AI-powered agents and create smaller, task-specific models.

Amazon and GitLab Inc GTLB announced an integrated offering that brings together GitLab Duo with Amazon Q to provide a seamless AI-powered developer experience that combines DevSecOps workflows with Amazon Q autonomous agents to help companies deliver secure software more quickly.

One of the latest announcements from the re:Invent conference is Amazon's new generation of foundation models called Amazon Nova. The following models will be available in Amazon Bedrock:

  • Amazon Nova Micro, Lite & Pro: very fast, text-to-text model
  • Amazon Nova Premier: multi-modal models that can process text, images and videos to generate text
  • Amazon Nova Canvas: additional model that generates studio-quality images
  • Amazon Nova Reel: additional model that generates studio-quality videos
"Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 generative AI applications in motion, and we've had a bird's-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with," said Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence.

"Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic capabilities."

Amazon's AWS re:Invent 2024 event is ongoing and further updates will likely be announced throughout the week.

AMZN Price Action: Amazon shares were up 0.89% at $212.58 at the time of publication, according to Benzinga Pro.