AWS re:Invent 2025 - Behind the curtain: How Amazon’s AI innovations are powered by AWS (INV211)

Powering Amazon's AI Innovations with AWS

Driving a Day One Culture at Amazon

• Amazon is focused on continuously improving the customer experience by fostering a "Day One" culture.
• This culture requires employees who are hungry to invent, move quickly, learn, and find new ways to better serve customers.
• Maintaining this mindset is key to Amazon's success and ability to innovate at scale.

Scaling Prime Day on AWS

• Prime is a massive operation with over 200 million members and 9 billion packages shipped in a single year.
• To support events like Prime Day, Amazon leverages a variety of AWS services at unprecedented scale:
  • Over 40% of Amazon.com served by Graviton instances during Prime Day
  • Elasticache serving over 1.5 quadrillion daily requests and 1.4 trillion per minute for ads
  • EBS transferring up to an exabyte of data per day
  • DynamoDB serving responses in under 10ms
  • CloudFront serving over 3 trillion HTTP requests

Rufus: Amazon's Generative AI Shopping Assistant

• Rufus is Amazon's AI-powered shopping assistant built on AWS to provide a personalized, intuitive shopping experience.
• Key capabilities:
  • Continuous batching and streaming inference on Trinium instances to minimize latency
  • Leveraging Amazon Bedrock for pre-generated prompts and agentic abilities to retrieve relevant information
  • Maintaining context and memory of the shopping session across devices
• Rufus is able to handle millions of customer requests during peak events like Prime Day by scaling to over 80,000 Trinium inference chips.
• Customers using Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase, demonstrating the business impact of this AI-powered assistant.

Empowering Amazon's E-Commerce Foundation with AI

• The E-Commerce Foundation (ECF) team oversees the core systems and services that power Amazon's global e-commerce operations.
• They are focused on using AI and AI-native processes to increase the productivity and velocity of their thousands of developers.
• Key initiatives:
  • Deploying over 21,000 AI "agents" across Amazon to automate and optimize common workflows, saving $2B annually.
  • Adopting an "AI-native" software development approach using tools like Kira and Spec Studio to boost developer velocity by 4.5x.
  • Targeting 75% of teams to use AI-native development by 2026 to accelerate innovation for customers.

Zuks: Powering Autonomous Vehicles with AWS

• Zuks, Amazon's autonomous vehicle company, has developed a purpose-built robo-taxi designed for AI-powered driving from the ground up.
• Key technical challenges:
  • Perceiving, predicting, and planning for complex urban environments in real-time
  • Generating and validating trillions of simulations to ensure safety and reliability
  • Scaling the AI workloads for perception, prediction, and motion planning
• Zuks leverages AWS services extensively to address these challenges:
  • S3 for storing petabytes of sensor data
  • SageMaker for training and validating AI models at scale
  • EC2 and Graviton for efficient, on-demand GPU capacity
  • EKS and other managed services for reliable, scalable infrastructure

Powering Prime Video's Sports Innovations with AWS

• Prime Video is using AI and machine learning to deliver unique, data-driven insights and experiences for live sports broadcasts.
  • "Prime Insights" features for NFL Thursday Night Football, including defensive alerts, pressure alerts, coverage ID, and pocket health.
  • The "Burn Bar" for NASCAR, using real-time telemetry data to predict and visualize fuel consumption.
  • Leveraging event detection and classification (EDC) to power features like rapid recaps and key moment highlights for NBA games.
• These innovations are built on a robust, AWS-powered architecture that enables real-time data processing, model inference, and seamless integration into the live production workflows.
• Prime Video is also using AWS to power their advanced production studios, blending physical and digital elements to create immersive experiences for fans.

Key Takeaways

• Amazon is leveraging AWS services and AI/ML capabilities to drive innovation across its businesses at unprecedented scale.
• From e-commerce and fulfillment to autonomous vehicles and sports entertainment, AWS is the foundational platform powering these innovations.
• By embracing an "AI-native" approach, Amazon is boosting developer productivity, automating workflows, and delivering more value to customers.
• The technical details and real-world examples showcase how AWS enables these complex, data-intensive workloads to be built, scaled, and operated efficiently.