AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Amazon Bedrock, Kiro in GovCloud Regions, new Agent Plugins, and more (February 23, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

Last week, my team met many developers at Developer Week in San Jose. My colleague, Vinicius Senger delivered a great keynote about renascent software—a new way of building and evolving applications where humans and AI collaborate as co-developers using Kiro. Other colleagues spoke about building and deploying production-ready AI agents. Everyone stayed to ask and…

Amazon EC2 Hpc8a Instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are now available

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc8a instances, a new high performance computing (HPC) optimized instance type powered by latest 5th Generation AMD EPYC processors with a maximum frequency of up to 4.5 GHz. These instances are ideal for compute-intensive tightly coupled HPC workloads, including computational fluid dynamics,…

Announcing Amazon SageMaker Inference for custom Amazon Nova models

By Dustin Ward

Since we launched Amazon Nova customization in Amazon SageMaker AI at AWS NY Summit 2025, customers have been asking for the same capabilities with Amazon Nova as they do when they customize open weights models in Amazon SageMaker Inference. They also wanted have more control and flexibility in custom model inference over instance types, auto-scaling…