What Amazon builds
Amazon is two things in this reference. It builds Nova, seven models covering text, image, video and speech, and through Bedrock it resells almost every other maker as well. Someone who says we use Amazon AI usually means the second one, and the two have almost nothing in common.
- Seven Nova models
- A marketplace for other makers
- Access by region
Last checked: This is a reference page. It is re-checked against the vendor sources and updated when a new version ships. What changed
Model families
The Nova family, from text-only Micro to speech-to-speech Sonic.
Versions
| Versions | Released | Status | Model families |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Nova Canvas | current | Amazon Nova | |
| Amazon Nova Lite | current | Amazon Nova | |
| Amazon Nova Micro | current | Amazon Nova | |
| Amazon Nova Premier | current | Amazon Nova | |
| Amazon Nova Pro | current | Amazon Nova | |
| Amazon Nova Reel | current | Amazon Nova | |
| Amazon Nova Sonic | current | Amazon Nova |
Amazon is two things here, and people read them as one
When someone says Amazon AI, they could mean two entirely different things. One is Nova: the seven models Amazon built itself. The other is Bedrock: the marketplace that sells other makers models.
And the marketplace is large. The Bedrock pricing page carries its own priced section for AI21 Labs, Amazon Nova, Amazon Titan, Anthropic, Cohere, DeepSeek, Luma AI, Meta, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Qwen, Stability AI, TwelveLabs and Writer. That is more makers under one roof than anywhere else in this reference.
The practical consequence: if you read that a company built on Amazon AI, there is a good chance the model doing the work is not Amazon at all. Claude from Anthropic, Llama from Meta and Command from Cohere are all sold on that same Bedrock.
200 languages in the cell, fifteen in the footnote
The Nova specification table has a row called Supported Languages and prints 200+ for all four text models. That cell carries a footnote marker, and the footnote reads: optimized for these 15 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, and Hebrew.
Arabic is there. Turkish is there. Persian is not.
This is the same pattern the voice category turned up: the large number sits in the cell people read, the real list sits in a footnote they do not. The 200+ means the model will work with them. The 15 is what Amazon commits to. For Persian text you are in the first group and not the second, and that is a thing to know before you price the work, not after.
The speech model in the family, Nova Sonic, is blunter: five languages, English US and UK, French, Italian, German and Spanish. There is no guessing there at all.
Access here is a list of data centres, not a list of countries
Every other maker in this reference publishes a supported-countries list. Amazon publishes a region list instead, and the difference is real: the model runs in a named data centre and you have to reach that data centre.
Nova Premier runs only in US East (N. Virginia) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). Pro, Lite and Micro run in N. Virginia, Tokyo, Sydney, London and GovCloud, and through cross-region inference they also reach Ohio, Oregon, Stockholm, Ireland, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul and Mumbai. Canvas and Reel are in N. Virginia, Ireland and Tokyo; Sonic in N. Virginia, Stockholm and Tokyo.
Not one of those lists contains a Middle East region. Amazon has Middle East regions; Nova is not served from them. The nearest place a Nova model actually runs is Mumbai, or Frankfurt.
On Iran specifically: Amazon publishes no supported-countries list we could cite, and the AWS customer agreement puts compliance with sanctions programs on the customer. So we do not say open and we do not say blocked. We say we found nothing to cite and we did not test the network.
The strongest model in the family is the most restricted one
Nova Premier has a one million token window and a ten thousand token ceiling on the answer. That ratio, a hundred to one, is the widest in this catalogue and it tells you what the model is for: read a great deal, reply briefly.
But the same table says three other things people rarely look at. Premier has no fine tuning. It has no provisioned throughput. And it runs in two regions. So the strongest model in the family is also the least reachable and the least flexible one. What Amazon intends it for is written in that table too: Premier is the teacher, and it trains the smaller models by distillation.
If you want a model to actually put into production, Pro and Lite are this family real choices, not Premier.
What we cannot tell you
The price of any Nova model. The Bedrock pricing page has the tables but injects the numbers client side, and the HTML this server receives carries a placeholder where the figure should be. There is nothing to read, so the price column for Nova models in our list is empty.
We write this down because it is a real problem for anyone trying to cost the work before signing up, and because it is the second time we have hit it in this reference. Google plan pricing page does the same thing.
What it is good at
- The largest number of makers under one roof: the Bedrock pricing page has a priced section for fourteen model families
- A one million token window on Nova Premier, with language count, regions and model IDs all written into one public table
- Arabic and Turkish are both in the list of fifteen committed languages
- The documentation gives both the API ID and the available regions per model, which is what you need to estimate latency
Where it falls short
- Persian is not in the list of fifteen optimized languages. The 200+ figure in the cell is not a commitment; the footnote is what commits.
- No Nova model is served from a Middle East region, not even through cross-region inference.
- Prices on the Bedrock page are built client side and cannot be read from the page HTML, so the Nova price column stays empty.
- Nova Premier has neither fine tuning nor provisioned throughput, so it is not a model for production at scale.
- Nova Sonic covers five languages and Persian is not among them.
- We found no supported-countries list for Bedrock we could cite, so on access from Iran we say neither yes nor no.
Our take
If you are already on AWS and want several makers models under one bill, Bedrock is the most sensible place in this reference. But do not read Amazon AI as Amazon own models: Nova makes no commitment on Persian text, and for Persian you should be looking at a maker that published its language list.
Questions people actually ask
Does Nova support Persian
Amazon prints 200+ languages in the table cell and names fifteen optimized languages in that cell footnote. Persian is not one of the fifteen. So the model will work with Persian, but Amazon commits to nothing about the quality.
What is the difference between Nova and Bedrock
Nova is the seven models Amazon built. Bedrock is the service that sells those seven alongside models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere and others. One name, two things.
Is Nova reachable from Iran
We do not know and we make no claim. Amazon publishes no country list we could cite. What can be said is that no Nova model is served from a Middle East region, and the nearest ones are Mumbai and Frankfurt.
What does Nova cost
We cannot tell you. The Bedrock pricing page fills its numbers in with JavaScript and the page HTML carries no figure. An empty price column means we could not read it.