AWS announces Amazon Bedrock general availability in Sydney region

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of its generative AI (GenAI) service Amazon Bedrock in the AWS Pacific (Sydney) Region.

The announcement was made before thousands of attendees at the AWS Summit Sydney this morning, where AWS continued to push the need for multiple large language models to suit specific business requirements.

Amazon Bedrock customers in the Sydney region can now access models including 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).

AWS said Amazon Bedrock's general availability in Sydney will allow customers to deploy GenAI workloads closer to end users, enabling lower latency for GenAI applications.

The company also noted the Sydney availability will support public sector organisations and companies in regulated industries.

Amazon Bedrock became generally available to all customers worldwide through select AWS Regions in 2023.

"We are in the midst of one of the biggest technology transformations since the invention of the cloud,” said Rianne Van Veldhuizen, managing director of Australia and New Zealand at AWS.

"This year, we will see customers and partners move from rapid generative AI experimentation to scalable, secure, and cost-effective production."

“Our planned $13.2 billion investment in our infrastructure in the nation by 2027 will provide our customers with access to our generative AI services including Amazon Bedrock."

"With Amazon Bedrock now available in the AWS Sydney Region, we’re giving customers even greater choice in where they run and train their generative AI workloads, supporting customers in highly regulated industries and those with low latency preferences to accelerate innovation, address business challenges, and help strengthen the nation's digital economy through this transformative technology."

Removes data sovereignty concerns

Mantel Group's partner for AWS Andre Morgan told CRN Australia that Amazon Bedrock's Sydney availability "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."

“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.”