On Wednesday, Amazon released what the company claims to be the most powerful artificial intelligence model in the Nova family, Nova Premier.
Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and video (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon claims that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep contextual understanding, multi-step planning, and precise execution across multiple tools and data sources.”
Amazon announced the Nova line of models in December at the annual AWS re:Invent conference. Over the past few months, the company has expanded the collection with image and video models, as well as audio-aware models and task-oriented agents.
Nova Premier, which has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze about 750,000 words at a time, is weaker in certain metrics than flagship models from rival AI companies such as Google. In the SWE-Bench Verified test, a coding test, Premier is inferior to Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and also performs poorly in math and science tests, GPQA Diamond and AIME 2025.
However, according to Amazon’s internal benchmarking, Premier performs well on knowledge retrieval and visual comprehension tests, SimpleQA, and MMMU.
At Bedrock, Premier costs $2.50 per 1 million tokens fed into the model and $12.50 per 1 million tokens generated by the model. This is roughly the same price as Gemini 2.5 Pro, which costs $2.50 per million incoming tokens and $15 per million outgoing tokens.
It is important to note that Premier is not a “reasoning” model. Unlike models such as OpenAI’s o4-mini and DeepSeek’s R1, it does not require additional time and computation to carefully think through and verify answers to questions.
Amazon is positioning Premier as the best tool for “training” smaller models through distillation – in other words, moving its use case capabilities into a faster, more efficient package.
Amazon sees artificial intelligence as an increasingly important component of its overall growth strategy. CEO Andy Jassy recently stated that the company is developing more than 1,000 AI-generating applications and that Amazon’s AI revenue is growing at a “triple-digit” percentage year-over-year to a “multi-billion dollar annual revenue.”
