Pinterest commits $4 billion to Amazon Web Services for cloud services

Pinterest Inc. seeks to accelerate its artificial intelligence development via a major expansion of its cloud collaboration with Amazon Web Services.

The visually-oriented social media platform plans to invest $4 billion on cloud services from Amazon Web Services, the hosted cloud subsidiary of Amazon, through 2031. The agreement is the largest infrastructure commitment in Pinterest history and is expected to enable it to provide a more responsive search and shopping experience and further modernize the infrastructure supporting visual search discovery. 

The company also intends to leverage AWS Trainium AI chips to host and run large language models and vision-language models to support personalized visual search and AI-assisted discovery. 

In addition, Pinterest plans to expand its use of AWS Graviton cloud processors, which already run roughly one-third of its compute infrastructure, to run more of the systems that support discovery. 

Pinterest will also continue its ongoing infrastructure modernization effort under the agreement, transitioning to an open source Kubernetes container orchestration platform-based architecture on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). The expanded partnership will include jointly optimizing one of the largest-scale data lakes on AWS. 

"Pinterest is heavily investing in AI to make discovery more personal, visual and actionable for the hundreds of millions of people who use our platform every month," said Matt Madrigal, CTO, Pinterest. "This expanded commitment with AWS gives us the compute flexibility, hardware optionality, and infrastructure efficiency to accelerate our AI vision for the next generation of visual discovery on Pinterest. This strategic partnership will help accelerate AI innovation at Pinterest, improving both our consumer experience and advertiser performance by advancing our proprietary models and our use of open-source models.”