AWS launches generative AI service Amazon Bedrock in APAC region

Amazon Bedrock became generally available to customers worldwide through select regions in 2023, and now it has been expanded to the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region; Image: Noah Berger / AWS via Reuters

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of its generative AI service Amazon Bedrock for the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, at the ongoing AWS Summit in Bengaluru. With Bedrock, customers can build and scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications with ease and in the most secure manner. 

In 2023, AWS announced plans to invest $12.7 billion in India’s local cloud infrastructure by 2030. This brings AWS’s total investment in India to Rs 1,36,500 crore ($16.4 billion) by 2030. This investment will contribute $23.3 billion to India’s GDP by 2030, and support approximately 131,700 full-time jobs annually at local businesses.

Bedrock became generally available to customers worldwide through select regions in 2023, and now it has been expanded to the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. This will help support customers across the country, including public sector organisations and companies in regulated industries.

During the press briefing, Shalini Kapoor, chief technologist–APJ public sector, director–AWS India and South Asia, explained the need for deploying generative AI workloads closer to end users, which will also help customers with low latency needs. Low latency is especially important for Gen AI applications in delivering faster processing and response times. “Our customers value choice; some prefer to build from scratch, while others prefer models tailored for specific use cases. We want to provide organisations in India with the performant, cost-effective infrastructure they need to build with generative AI,” said Kapoor. 

Also read: Inside Amazon's game plan for India

Organisations across India are using generative AI for a wide variety of use cases, including driving productivity gains, creating innovative user experiences, and reimagining work. “The availability of Amazon Bedrock in India will further spur innovation that large enterprises, startups, independent software vendors, and public sector organisations are building in India, and complement their efforts to upskill their talent in generative AI.” 

VG Sundar Ram, head of business development, AWS India and South Asia, spoke about how generative AI innovation will only be accelerated with Amazon Bedrock. He explains, “Take the financial services industry, for example, trading firms could supercharge their trading algorithms with generative AI to continually optimise trading strategies based on real-time portfolio performance and evolving market conditions. Or, in the healthcare industry, hospitals could use virtual care assistants to alleviate resource constraints by using conversational language capabilities to assist with patient queries.”

Gen AI for upskilling and entrepreneurship

Based on the recent AWS-commissioned study, titled “Accelerating AI Skills: Preparing the Asia-Pacific Workforce for Jobs of the Future”, AI skills could boost salaries of workers in India by more than 54 percent and accelerate career growth as AI adoption ramps up. Since 2017, AWS has trained 5.5 million people across India in cloud services. However, given how rapidly evolving AI is, more needs to be done to upskill the workforce. 

In November 2023, Amazon launched the AI Ready initiative that complements AWS’s commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million individuals globally by 2025. This programme offers a suite of free AI and generative AI training courses, aligned to both technical and non-technical roles, so that anyone can acquire AI skills. 

Also read: What business leaders really think about Generative AI

As for entrepreneurship, AWS along with venture capital firm Accel have launched the ML Elevate programme. This is helping startups build generative AI applications for scale. According to a recent study by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), called Generative AI startup landscape in India—A 2023 perspective, generative AI startups in the country have raised over $475 million in private investments from January 2021 to May 2023. This programme aims to support generative AI startups by providing them access to impactful AI models and tools, business and technical mentorship, curated resources, up to $200,000 in AWS Credits, peer support among others.