AWS partners with Novo Nordisk on AI drug discovery and retires four Nova models

AWS announced that Novo Nordisk has selected it as preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner, with a dedicated co-innovation hub in London focused on 'compressing the path from drug target to first human dose.' As AWS Chief AI Officer Matt Wood described it, Novo Nordisk scientists and AWS engineers will use Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock to connect genomic, imaging, and clinical data across the discovery process, enabling tighter cycles of hypothesis, computation, and experimentation. CEO Andy Jassy publicly championed the deal.

The partnership is a marquee enterprise win in the high-value pharma vertical, where AI-accelerated drug discovery is one of the most concrete commercial applications of frontier compute. It positions AWS's Bio Discovery and AgentCore stack against Google's Isomorphic Labs and Microsoft's healthcare AI efforts.

In a separate but concurrent move, Amazon began winding down four of its own Nova models — Nova Premier, Nova Omni, Nova Reel, and Nova Canvas — described as part of a frontier-chasing overhaul. The deprecation suggests Amazon is consolidating its first-party model lineup rather than maintaining a broad but middling catalog, likely leaning harder on partner models (Anthropic, OpenAI via Bedrock) for frontier capability.

Skeptics will watch whether the Novo Nordisk hub produces measurable discovery-timeline improvements versus press-release optimism, and what the Nova retirements signal about Amazon's first-party model ambitions. What to watch: concrete milestones from the London hub, and which models absorb the retired Nova workloads.