What is Amazon Nova?
Amazon Nova is Amazon's family of foundation models, offered through Amazon Bedrock on AWS. The text models span a speed-to-capability range (Micro, Lite, Pro, and a higher-end tier), and the family adds image generation (Nova Canvas) and video generation (Nova Reel).
Nova is built for builders already on AWS: it is priced to be cost-efficient, integrates with Bedrock's tooling for retrieval, agents, and guardrails, and runs inside the AWS security and compliance perimeter.
Nova is the family to evaluate when your stack is on AWS and you want competitive, low-cost models with native access to Bedrock features, rather than a standalone consumer chatbot.
What it's best for
- Teams already building on AWS who want models inside the Bedrock ecosystem.
- Cost-efficient, high-volume text workloads where price-per-token matters.
- Retrieval, agents, and safety guardrails through Bedrock's built-in tooling.
- Image generation (Nova Canvas) and short video generation (Nova Reel) within AWS.
- Workloads that must stay inside an existing AWS security and compliance boundary.
Where it falls short
- A standalone consumer chatbot: Nova is a builder-focused model family on Bedrock, not a public assistant app.
- Self-hosting outside AWS: the models are offered as a managed service, not as downloadable open weights.
- Teams not on AWS who do not want to adopt the Bedrock platform to use them.
Access through Bedrock
Enable the Nova models in Amazon Bedrock, then call them through the Bedrock API or console. Pick a text tier by your speed and capability needs, from Micro for cheap high-volume work up to the higher-end tier for harder tasks.
Use Nova Canvas for image generation and Nova Reel for short video, both through Bedrock.
Build with Bedrock features
Bedrock provides knowledge bases for retrieval-augmented generation, agents for tool use, and guardrails for safety filtering, all of which work with the Nova models.
Because everything runs within AWS, your data stays inside your AWS account and region, which simplifies the data-governance story for teams already standardized on AWS.
Getting better answers
Match the model tier to the task: do not pay for the top tier on simple extraction, and do not under-provision on hard reasoning.
Ground answers with a Bedrock knowledge base when accuracy over your own documents matters, and add guardrails for production use.
What Amazon Nova costs
Approximate, in USD, as of January 2026. Prices change often. Confirm on the official site before you rely on them.
Bedrock (text)
Usage-based
Priced per million input/output tokens by tier; the lower tiers are very cost-efficient.
Nova Canvas / Reel
Usage-based
Priced per generated image or per second of video.
Enterprise (AWS)
Custom
Standard AWS enterprise agreements, committed-use discounts, and support tiers.
Example prompts
Copy these into Amazon Nova as starting points, then adapt them to your task.
Extract {fields} from each record below as JSON. Return only valid JSON, one object per record, with null for missing values. Optimize for a low-cost model tier.Answer the question using only the retrieved passages from the knowledge base. Cite the source for each claim, and say so if the passages do not contain the answer.
Generate a clean product image: a single ceramic mug on a plain light background, soft studio lighting, centered, no text.
Given this workload (volume, latency target, and task difficulty), recommend which Amazon Nova text tier to use and explain the cost and quality trade-off.
Amazon Nova
common questions.
Direct answers to the questions we get asked the most. If yours isn't covered, write to the team.