awsMay 18, 2026

AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Transform at 1 year, Claude Platform on AWS, EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances, and more (May 18, 2026) | Amazon Web Services (opens in new tab)

AWS’s May 18, 2026 roundup highlights the rapid expansion of AI-assisted modernization, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling. AWS Transform reached its first anniversary after processing billions of lines of code and migrating hundreds of thousands of servers, while new services provide direct Claude access, stronger Mac development hardware, improved analytics, and automated security remediation. The roundup also covers multicloud connectivity, AI research funding, community events, and startup credits. ## AWS Transform Reaches Its First Anniversary - AWS Transform launched a year earlier for modernizing .NET, mainframe, and VMware workloads. - New capabilities include: - Custom AWS-managed or user-defined code transformations - Language and framework upgrades - Performance optimization and code analysis - Full-stack Windows modernization - Mainframe reimagining and automated testing - In its first 12 months, customers: - Migrated hundreds of thousands of servers - Saved more than 1.6 million hours - Processed over 4.5 billion lines of code - AWS Transform agents are now available in Kiro, Claude, Cursor, and Codex. ## Major Product Launches - **Claude Platform on AWS:** Provides Anthropic’s native Claude APIs, console, and beta features through existing AWS accounts and billing. Anthropic operates the service, and customer data is processed outside the AWS security boundary. - **EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances:** Use Apple M3 Ultra Mac Studio hardware with a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, and 256 GB of unified memory. Compared with M4 Max instances, they offer more CPU, GPU, Neural Engine cores, and memory for parallel Xcode simulators and on-device machine learning. - **Redshift RG instances:** AWS Graviton-based instances run workloads up to 2.4 times faster than previous RA3 instances while costing 30% less per vCPU. They include a vectorized engine for Apache Iceberg and Parquet data. - **Bedrock Advanced Prompt Optimization:** Compares original and optimized prompts across as many as five models, helping users improve performance or migrate between models. - **AWS Security Agent repository scanning:** The preview feature analyzes entire codebases and generates fixes linked to specific files and lines. It is free for existing Security Agent customers during the preview. - **AWS Interconnect for OCI:** Enables private, resilient multicloud connections to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The same open specification already supports Google Cloud and is planned for Azure later in 2026. ## Research, Community, and Startup Updates - AWS is investing $110 million in the Build on Trainium program to give university researchers access to purpose-built AI chips. - Research at institutions including UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon is open source, allowing improvements to benefit the broader developer community. - AWS Community Days 2026 will take place globally, with agendas organized by local developer communities. - The Kiro Startups Credit program has reopened, offering eligible organizations up to one year of Kiro Pro+ credits applied through AWS accounts. AWS’s latest updates emphasize managed AI tools, faster specialized hardware, automated modernization, and broader support for developers and researchers. Organizations can particularly benefit by evaluating AWS Transform, Bedrock prompt optimization, new Mac instances, and the expanding multicloud connectivity options.

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awsMar 2, 2026

AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI partnership, AWS Elemental Inference, Strands Labs, and more (March 2, 2026) | Amazon Web Services (opens in new tab)

The March 2, 2026 AWS Weekly Roundup focuses on AWS’s expanding AI ecosystem, including a major strategic partnership with OpenAI and new tools for production AI development. It also highlights services for video transformation, enterprise security, application isolation, and agentic workloads. The broader message is that AWS is moving AI from experimentation toward scalable, enterprise-ready operations. ## OpenAI and AWS Strategic Partnership - Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI: - $15 billion initially. - A further $35 billion subject to conditions. - AWS and OpenAI are developing a Stateful Runtime Environment for OpenAI models through Amazon Bedrock. - The environment allows applications to: - Preserve context and prior work. - Operate across tools and data sources. - Access compute resources. - AWS becomes OpenAI Frontier’s exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for building and managing AI-agent teams. - The companies are expanding their existing $38 billion agreement by another $100 billion over eight years. - OpenAI plans to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium capacity, including Trainium3 and Trainium4. ## Major AWS Product Launches - **AWS Security Hub Extended** - Provides integrated procurement and management for partner security products. - Includes vendors such as CrowdStrike, Okta, Splunk, Zscaler, and others. - Offers one AWS bill, pay-as-you-go pricing, unified Security Hub operations, and Level 1 support for Enterprise Support customers. - **AWS Elemental Inference** - Uses AI to transform live and on-demand video for mobile and social platforms. - Automatically creates vertical video for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. - Extracts highlight clips with 6–10 seconds of latency. - Early media customers reported at least 34% savings on AI-powered live video workflows. - **MediaConvert Probe API** - Provides free, rapid media metadata analysis without processing the video. - Returns information such as codecs, pixel formats, and color spaces. - **OpenAI-Compatible Projects API for Amazon Bedrock** - Adds application-level isolation for generative AI workloads. - Improves access control, cost tracking, and organizational observability through OpenAI-compatible APIs. - **Amazon Location Service LLM Context** - Provides curated context for AI agents through Kiro, Claude Code, and the open Agent Skills format. - Helps developers implement location-aware features more accurately. - **Open-Source EKS Node Monitoring Agent** - Makes the agent’s implementation available for inspection, customization, and community contributions. - **AWS AppConfig and New Relic Integration** - Supports automated rollback through New Relic Workflow Automation. - Aims to reduce deployment issue detection and remediation from minutes to seconds. ## Strands Labs and Additional AWS Resources - AWS introduced **Strands Labs**, a separate organization for experimental agentic AI projects. - Its initial projects are: - Robots. - Robots Sim. - AI Functions. - Other highlighted resources cover: - Managing 6,000 AWS accounts with a three-person platform team. - Building event-driven agents with Bedrock AgentCore and Knowledge Bases. - Shifting complexity from application code into platform operations through account-per-tenant architectures. ## AWS Community Highlights - A practical guide for running effective Kiro AI coding workshops. - A comparison of traditional RAG using FAISS with GraphRAG using Neo4j to evaluate hallucination reduction in travel agents. - New AWS CLI v2 output options, including structured error output and the `off` format. ## Upcoming Events - **NVIDIA GTC 2026:** March 16–19 in San Jose, with AWS sessions, demos, and booths. - **AWS Summits:** Paris on April 1, London on April 22, and Bengaluru on April 23–24. - **AWS Community Days:** Events in Tokyo, Chennai, Slovakia, and Pune during March. AWS’s latest announcements point toward a tightly integrated AI platform combining specialized hardware, managed agent infrastructure, enterprise security, and production-focused developer tools. Organizations evaluating AI adoption should watch these services closely, particularly Bedrock’s new stateful and application-isolation capabilities and Elemental Inference’s automated media workflows.

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