UPDATED 19:56 EST / DECEMBER 01 2022

CLOUD

AWS adds Yahoo and Stability AI to its growing list of cloud customers

Amazon Web Services Inc. wrapped up day four of its annual conference AWS re:Invent with news of some big customer wins. Both Yahoo Inc. and Stability AI Ltd. said they have chosen AWS as their preferred public cloud provider for key business workloads.

In Yahoo’s case, the internet giant said it has chosen AWS to host the operations of its Yahoo Ad Tech advertising technology business. The company is planning to migrate all of Yahoo Ad Tech’s workloads to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, including its media-buying and supply-side platforms, its analytics and identity solutions.

Yahoo seems to think it will gain some big benefits from the move. Yahoo Ad Tech is a big business, serving up ads to more than 540 million people globally via a range of media, including TV channels, mobile applications and websites. The platform already relies on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute’s instances to power insights related to ad performance.

In addition, Yahoo said, its ad-decisioning engine that helps advertisers to manage campaigns will gain new features by leveraging AWS’s analytics, machine learning and serverless infrastructure. As an example, Yahoo said it will help its partners to add superior ad measurement capabilities, optimize real-time bidding for advertising slots, and hone its ad inventory and effectiveness to help customers determine the best mix of ads.

Another key benefit of the move to Amazon is that Yahoo Ad Tech will be able to build a centralized data lake on Amazon S3, which will store hundreds of petabytes of data. According to the company, this data lake will help it to break down data silos and take better advantage of AWS’ analytics services, including its big data processing service Amazon EMR and its interactive query service Amazon Athena. The idea is to enable rapid analysis of data from multiple sources, helping customers better understand advertising trends and target audiences.

Aaron Lake, senior vice president of platforms engineering and chief information officer at Yahoo, said his company intends to harness the power of AWS to move faster and offer customers a superior advertising platform that provides the right combination of performance, audiences and growth.

“Running all of Yahoo Ad Tech on AWS provides us with a broad portfolio of world-class services that will allow us to help advertisers achieve the returns they want by providing them with precise audience targeting, while our ad publisher customers are able to scale and monetize their ad space,” Lake said.

As for Stability AI, it said it has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider to help it develop and deploy new artificial intelligence models for image, language, audio, video and 3D content generation.

Stability AI is an AI-driven visual art startup that designs and implements open AI tools that people can use to create images based on text input. Its generative AI models transform text commands into images and other forms of media using collective intelligence and augmented technology, helping its clients to develop cutting-edge open AI models for image, language, audio, video, 3D and biology.

Given what it does, AWS seems a good fit for Stability AI. The startup already uses the Amazon SageMaker machine learning service to accelerate its work on designing machine learning models. Those models require powerful infrastructure, so Stability AI is also planning to provision one of the largest cluster of machine learning compute instances on the AWS cloud.

Going forward, the startup said it will rely on Amazon’s machine learning and AI services to build and train its future models, achieving the best performance at the lowest possible cost. In addition, Stability AI said it intends to make its open-source models available through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, an ML model hub that can be accessed by all AWS customers.

Stability AI founder and Chief Executive Emad Mostaque said his company is building nothing less than the foundation required to activate humanity’s potential through AI.

“AWS has played an integral role in scaling our open-source foundation models across modalities,” Mostaque said. “We are delighted to run these models on Amazon SageMaker to enable tens of thousands of developers and millions of users to leverage the power of AI with a robust set of tools.”

The addition of Yahoo and Stability AI are just the latest in a string of big customer wins for AWS. Today AWS also announced an expanded multiyear relationship with American Family Insurance. As part of the agreement, the insurance company said, it has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider to help accelerate cloud migration among other benefits.

Earlier this week, it announced that Brookfield Asset Management Inc. had also chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider. Consulting firm Slalom LLC announced a multiyear extension to its agreement with AWS to collaborate on developing solutions and accelerators on AWS for customers in the energy, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, public sector, and media and entertainment industries to migrate to the cloud.

Prior to that, the geospatial intelligence software firm Descartes Labs Inc. said it was going “all-in” on Amazon’s cloud. Similarly, the electric vehicle charger manufacturer Wallbox Chargers S.L. is also going all-in on AWS.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE

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