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

Amazon Web Services Inc. wrapped up day four of its annual AWS re:Invent conference with news from some top customers. Yahoo Inc. and Stability AI Ltd. said they chose AWS as their preferred public cloud provider for key enterprise workloads.

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

Yahoo seems to think it will benefit greatly from this decision. Yahoo Ad Tech is a large company that serves ads to over 540 million people worldwide through a range of media, including TV channels, mobile apps, and websites. The platform already relies on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute instances to power ad performance insights.

Additionally, Yahoo said, its ad decision engine that helps advertisers manage campaigns will get new features by leveraging AWS analytics, machine learning and serverless infrastructure. For example, Yahoo said it will help partners add superior ad measurement capabilities, optimize real-time bidding for ad slots, and fine-tune its ad inventory and effectiveness to help customers determine the best combination of ads.

Another key benefit of moving to Amazon is that Yahoo Ad Tech will be able to create 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 break down data silos and better leverage AWS analytics services, including its Amazon EMR big data processing service and its Amazon Athena interactive query service. The idea is to enable rapid analysis of data from multiple sources, helping clients better understand advertising trends and target audiences.

Aaron Lake, senior vice president of platform 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 delivers the right mix of performance, reach, 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 get the returns they want by providing them with precise audience targeting, while our ad publisher customers can scale and monetize their ad space,” Lake said.

As for Stability AI, he said he chose AWS as the preferred cloud provider to help him develop and deploy new artificial intelligence models for generating image, language, audio, video and 3D content.

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 textual commands into images and other forms of media using collective intelligence and augmented technology, helping its clients develop state-of-the-art open AI models for image, language,… audio, video, 3D and biology.

Given what it does, AWS seems like a good fit for Stability AI. The startup is already using Amazon’s SageMaker machine learning service to speed up its work building machine learning models. These models require powerful infrastructure, so Stability AI also plans to deliver one of the largest clusters of machine learning compute instances on the AWS cloud.

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

Stability AI Founder and CEO Emad Mostaque said his company is building nothing less than the foundation needed to activate humanity’s potential through AI.

“AWS has been instrumental in scaling our core open source models across modalities,” Mostaque said. “We’re excited to run these models on Amazon SageMaker to empower tens of thousands of developers and millions of users to leverage the power of AI with a robust toolset.”

The addition of Yahoo and Stability AI is just the latest in a series of big customer wins for AWS. Today, AWS also announced an expanded multi-year relationship with American Family Insurance. As part of the deal, the insurance company said it chose AWS as its preferred cloud provider to help accelerate cloud migration, among other benefits.

Earlier this week, he announced that Brookfield Asset Management Inc. had also chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider. Consulting firm Slalom LLC announced a multi-year extension of its agreement with AWS to collaborate on the development of solutions and accelerators on AWS for customers in the energy, financial services, healthcare, life, public sector, media and entertainment are moving to the cloud.

Previously, geospatial intelligence software company Descartes Labs Inc. said it was going “all-in” on Amazon’s cloud. Similarly, electric vehicle charger maker Wallbox Chargers SL is also launching on AWS.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE