Amazon Nova 2

What it is

Amazon Nova 2 is the second generation of Amazon's Nova models. It was released at AWS re:Invent, the company's annual conference, in December 2025, and Amazon announced its first member, Nova 2 Lite, on 2 December 2025.^[1][2] Nova 2 Lite is a fast, cost-effective reasoning model. A reasoning model is one that works through intermediate steps before giving an answer. It is available in Amazon Bedrock.^[1] Nova 2 is the successor to the first Nova family, which was introduced in December 2024.^[1]

Origins

The family's members cover different tasks: a reasoning model, a speech model, an omni model released in preview, and two services for building with the models, Nova Forge for custom models and Nova Act for agents.^[2][3]

Key features

Extended thinking is off by default in Nova 2 Lite. When users turn it on, they choose a low, medium or high thinking budget, which sets how much reasoning the model may do before it answers.^[1]

Nova 2 Lite accepts text, images, video and documents as input. Its context window is 1 million tokens.^[1]

The model includes built-in tools. These are web grounding with citations, which lets answers be tied to web sources, and a code interpreter, which runs code the model writes.^[1]

Nova 2 Lite is available through global cross-Region inference in Amazon Bedrock. Its model ID is global.amazon.nova-2-lite-v1:0.^[1]

The family

The Nova 2 family includes Nova 2 Sonic, a next-generation speech-to-speech model, and Nova 2 Omni, which was released in preview.^[1][3] Nova Forge was launched alongside the family. It lets customers build their own frontier models starting from Nova checkpoints, which are saved states of trained models, and it blends the customer's proprietary data with datasets curated by Nova.^[2][3]

Nova Act is an AWS service for building and running fleets of agents that automate workflows in a browser user interface. It became generally available at the same time, and Nova 2 Lite powers it.^[1][3] Amazon said early Nova Act customers reached 90% reliability on browser-based workflows.^[2]

Where it fits

Nova 2 succeeds the first Nova family.^[1] The family pairs the models with tools for customers who want to train their own versions, as Nova Forge does, and with agent services such as Nova Act, which uses Nova 2 Lite.^[2][3]