Amazon Nova Premier becomes generally available

Background

Nova Premier was the most capable model in the first Nova family from Amazon. Its release brought that model into Amazon Bedrock, the AWS service through which customers use foundation models.

What happened

On 30 April 2025 AWS made Nova Premier generally available in Amazon Bedrock.^[1] The model accepts text, images and video and has a context length of 1 million tokens.^[1] AWS said it was the most capable Nova model across 17 benchmarks.^[1]

Key details

AWS positioned the model as a teacher for distilling smaller Nova models. In AWS's example, a Nova Pro distilled from Premier was 20% more accurate on API calls than the base model.^[1] Distillation means training a smaller model to imitate a larger one. The model launched in three US regions through cross-Region inference, which routes requests across AWS Regions.^[1]

Foundation models of this kind are large neural networks trained on very large amounts of data, and they can be used for many tasks. Distillation is one way to make such a model practical for a narrower job. A developer can ask the large model to answer many examples of a task, then use those question-and-answer pairs to train a smaller model. The smaller model usually performs that task well, but it generally knows less than the large model about other subjects.

Cross-Region inference is the feature that lets a request be handled in a different AWS Region from the one that received it, which can help when one Region is busy. The three launch Regions were all in the United States.^[1]

The practical effect is that one large model in the family can serve as the source for several smaller models, each of which can then be used for a more specific job. Developers use a model ID, such as the one listed above, to name the model they want in a request.

Impact

The release made a large model available to customers, and it also made the model available as a source from which smaller Nova models could be distilled.^[1] The model's ID for cross-Region inference is us.amazon.nova-premier-v1:0.^[1]