With Nova Forge, AWS gives companies a path to build foundation-class models without GPUs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leaning into the growing trend toward custom models with a new service that it says will let enterprises bring more personalization and internal knowledge. The move comes alongside the release of AWS’s new models as part of its Nova family, which expands the capabilities of its reasoning models.Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Pro, Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Omni update the first Nova models AWS announced last year.Nova 2 Lite is a fast, cost-effective reasoning model optimized for everyday tasks that can process text, images and videos to generate text. Nova 2 Pro, which AWS said is its most intelligent reasoning model, can handle complex tasks such as coding agents, long-range planning and problem-solving. It can act as a “teacher” model for distillation projects. Nova 2 Sonic is a speech-to-speech model, while Nova 2 Omni enables organizations to generate both text and images from text, image and video inputs. Nova Act, AWS’s browser agent — announced as an experimental development kit in April — is also powered by the Nova 2 models and now available to customers. However, it is the custom model service, Nova Forge, that AWS is most excited about. The service gives customers the ability to introduce proprietary data to a pre-trained model without fear that the model will forget its previous training. Nova Forge allows enterprises to create custom, optimized versions of Nova models, which it calls “Novellas,” and bring them directly to its Amazon Bedrock platform. Custom model creation Enterprises are increasingly turning to model distillation or custom models, especially with many industries choosing to create foundation models with domain-specific knowledge. But these can often be out of reach for many companies, as not everyone can afford several Nvidia GPU H100s to build models from scratch. As a result, they turn to heavily fine-tuned open-source off-the-shelf models. “You just don’t have a great way to get a frontier model that deeply understands your data and your domain,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said during his keynote speech at AWS’s annual re: Invent conference.  “But what if it was possible? What if you could integrate your data at the right time during the training of a frontier model, then create a proprietary model that was just for you?” Nova Forge employs what AWS calls “open training,” which allows developers to blend their proprietary data with an Amazon-curated dataset at every step of model development, with checkpoints during training. AWS said this means models will not regress on foundational capabilities, such as instruction following, while learning company-specific knowledge and instructions. Each “Novella” could be a custom version of Nova 2 Lite, with Nova’s full knowledge and reasoning power, but with domain-specificity. Right now, enterprises can only make Novellas from Nova 2 Lite, but many will expand to other Nova 2 models soon. Nova Forge also offers enterprises “reinforcement learning gyms.” This allows them to train AI systems through their own environments with simulated scenarios to create smaller, faster models and access responsible AI toolkits. Once companies create their Novellas, they can bring them to Bedrock to build more applications and agents. One customer currently using Nova Forge is Reddit, which integrated its own data and community-specific knowledge into a model to build a moderation program. Nova Forge only works with Nova models, and AWS does not plan to bring in third-party open-source models hosted on Bedrock (for now).Nova 2 models in detailAWS said tens of thousands of companies now use its Nova models and the company expects the Nova 2 models to see the same adoption. “Nova 2 Lite delivers incredible price performance for many workloads that we actually see our customers wanting to deliver in production,” Garman said. “We think Nova 2 Lite will be the workhorse for many companies, while Pro will be for more complex tasks and for when you need your agents to be great.”In a press release, AWS said evaluations showed Nova 2 Lite performed “equal or better on 13 out of 15 benchmarks compared to Claude Haiku 4.5, equal or better on 11 out of 17 benchmarks compared to GPT-5 Mini and equal or better on 14 out of 18 benchmarks compared to Gemini Flash 2.5.”Users can adjust how much Nova 2 Lite shows its step-by-step thinking to balance costs with depth. Nova Pro 2 also performed well in benchmark testing compared to Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This model works best for multi-document analysis, video reasoning, advanced math and agentic engineering tasks. AWS said in its press release that both Nova 2 Lite and Pro “have built-in grounding and code execution capabilities.”Nova 2 Sonic, the speech-to-speech model, generates human-like conversations and now supports multiple languages. The updated model has a 1-million-token context window, with more expressive voices and higher accuracy. The company said Sonic can even switch topics mid-conversation.Nova 2 Omni handles “up to 750,000 words, hours of audio, long videos and hundred-page documents, simultaneously analyzing entire product catalogs, testimonials, brand guidelines and video libraries at once.” “While there are no comparable models in the industry to Nova 2 Omni, it demonstrates strengths in public benchmarks of multimodal reasoning on documents, images, videos and audio, and can generate high-quality images similar to other leading image-generation models,” AWS said in its release.