Amazon launches Nova 2 and Nova Forge at re:Invent 2025

Background

Nova 2 is the successor to Amazon's first Nova family.^[1] It was presented at AWS re:Invent, the company's annual conference.^[1][2]

What happened

On 2 December 2025, at AWS re:Invent, Amazon released the Nova 2 family of models.^[1][2] The centrepiece was Nova 2 Lite, a reasoning model with optional extended thinking.^[1]

Key details

Nova 2 Lite offers extended thinking at three budget levels: low, medium and high. Its context window is 1 million tokens.^[1] The family also includes the speech-to-speech model Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Omni, which was in preview.^[1]

Amazon introduced Nova Forge for training custom models from pre-trained Nova checkpoints. A checkpoint is a saved state of a trained model, and Amazon described the approach as open training.^[2] Nova Act, an agent service for automating browser user-interface workflows, became generally available.^[1]

The same event also launched Trainium3 UltraServers and three frontier agents, including the Kiro autonomous agent.^[2]

Reasoning models differ from models that answer immediately, because they spend part of their effort on intermediate steps before giving an answer. Extended thinking lets the user decide how much of that effort to use. A larger budget may help on hard problems but takes longer to answer, while a smaller budget keeps replies quick.

Custom model training means training a model further on a customer's own data so that it fits that customer's tasks. An agent service such as Nova Act runs a program that carries out a sequence of steps on a website or app on the user's behalf.

Amazon presented these announcements together at one event, so the Nova 2 family, Nova Forge, Nova Act and the Trainium3 UltraServers were all part of the same set of announcements at re:Invent.^[2]

Impact

The launch extended the Nova family with a reasoning model, a speech model and an omni model in preview. It also gave customers a way to build their own models from Nova checkpoints, and an agent service that Nova 2 Lite powers.^[1][2]