AWS launches general availability of Bedrock in Sydney

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched its artificial intelligence (AI) tool Amazon Bedrock into general availability in its Sydney Region.

Amazon Bedrock is a managed service that provides a variety of high-performing foundational models from a number of AI companies such as Amazon Titan (Text Lite, Text Express, Multi-modal Embeddings), Cohere (Embeddings English, Embeddings Multi-lingual), Anthropic (Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet), and Mistral (Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, Mistral Large)  through an application programming interface (API).

The general availability was announced at the cloud giant’s Sydney Summit keynote presentation by AWS managing director for Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) Rianne Van Veldhuizen, who claimed users will have the “flexibility to run and store all of your data and applications locally”.

“By bringing these workloads together to our end users, we let them deliver even lower latency and ensuring seamless customer experiences,” she said.

Speaking more generally on AI, Van Veldhuizen said generative AI (GenAI) is “not the end game” but the “start of a new generation”.

“What does the immediate future look like for generative AI? Our customers are asking how can I scale generative AI in a safe, cost effective and sustainable way? To support that here in Australia [and] New Zealand we will continue to invest in infrastructure and skills in our partners,” she added.

“Infrastructure is so critical. Since launching the AWS Sydney region over a decade ago, we have invested over $9 billion into the Australian economy, but we want to do more to accelerate that growth. So over the next three years, we are investing a further $13 billion in a lot of cloud infrastructure, including a new AWS region in Melbourne.”

AWS claimed the general availability of Bedrock will support a range of GenAI applications can be run and stored.

“Deploying generative AI workloads closer to end users will also help customers with low latency needs,” AWS claimed. “Low latency is especially important for generative AI applications in delivering faster processing and response times, which are essential for AI tasks like on-the-fly content generation, interactive user experiences, and real-time conversational insights.”

Deloitte claimed it was the first partner to gain local access to Bedrock.

The service was announced in April last year and first entered into general availability for AWS’s US East and West regions in North Virginia and Oregon, respectively, in September 2023.

Some partners have welcomed the general availability announcement with open arms, like consultancy  Mantel Group, with AWS partner Andre Morgan calling it “massive”.

“Australian customers and partners have been begging for local access to AWS’ Bedrock … tools,” he said.

“It means clients with stringent regulatory requirements like those in government, healthcare and financial services can now use AWS’s Generative AI offering that helps them get running in days instead of weeks and keep their data local. Previously there were a lot of data sovereignty restrictions that prevented them from sending their data outside Australian-based servers.”

“Australian based customers wanted to explore the power and innovation of AWS GenAI but have, prior to this announcement, shied away from Amazon Bedrock because of concerns about data sovereignty and risk controls and having to send their data to a US-based service. This has given other hyperscalers an edge until now. For customers it’s great news, they’ve got more choice.”